School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it-… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Consider... the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image