« All Up Quotes · H. L. Mencken's Page
Up Quotes by H. L. Mencken
- Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and…
- I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who…
- And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring…
- It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup,…
- Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to…
- The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same…
- Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your…
- There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or…
- The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
- A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood…
- Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up…
- The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.
- No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.
- 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…
- A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
- A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
- Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
- One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to…
- You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
- Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right…
- To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride…
- The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
More Up Quotes
- The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. — Hannah Arendt
- Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can… — Hannah Arendt
- I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up… — J. J. Abrams
- All virtue is summed up in dealing justly. — Aristotle
- Growing up, my ideals were Barbra Streisand, Cher, and my mom. — Kevyn Aucoin
- When I was growing up, the men in my life were abusive; women were the ones I ran to for comfort. — Kevyn Aucoin
- Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see… — Paul Auster
- Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them… — Paul Auster
- Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside… — Diane Ackerman
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- Get this in mind early: We never grow up. — Richard Bach
- People are so damned afraid that one day they might wake up and discover that they've grown old. — Billie Joe Armstrong