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Human Quotes by H. L. Mencken
- The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
- As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far…
- My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought..
- It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of…
- For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
- The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of…
- Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are…
- It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man…
- The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is…
- Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.
- Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
- The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to.…
- The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries…
- Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the…
- It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for…
- The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
- In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
- Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings…
- Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every…
- We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small…
- All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped…
- The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed…
- What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human…
- Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
- The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a…
More Ways to Read Human Quotes by H. L. Mencken
More Human Quotes
- The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. — Hannah Arendt
- Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly… — Hannah Arendt
- The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are… — Hannah Arendt
- We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for… — Hannah Arendt
- It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded… — Hannah Arendt
- When you care about human beings, you do your best to not repress and to not let people to repress and to… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. — Aristotle
- Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others. — Aristotle
- I'd love to do a movie where the monster is human, where the issue is not otherworldly, or horror or science fiction. — J. J. Abrams
- Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them… — Paul Auster
- No one's really happy anyway, it's not human. — Billie Joe Armstrong
- The things that people do now in sports, you can't even believe. These are complete total athletes. To see what human beings… — Billie Joe Armstrong