Amusing Quote by H. L. Mencken

“War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.”

H. L. Mencken

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.6 out of 5 (8 ratings)

More by H. L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

H. L. Mencken

Image

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

H. L. Mencken

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

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

Image

Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead.

H. L. Mencken

Image

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

H. L. Mencken

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

Image

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

H. L. Mencken

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

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

Image

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

H. L. Mencken

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 government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws… There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased…

H. L. Mencken

Explore all 827 H. L. Mencken quotes

More Amusing quotes

“I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist…

Richard Dawkins

Image

By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who…

Pablo Picasso

Image

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle… Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent…

Abraham Joshua Heschel

No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming…

Gregory Maguire

Image

Funny things tend not to happen to me. I am not a natural comic. I need to think about things a lot before I…

Rowan Atkinson

Image

[A]n Obama presidency would be an amusing approximation of the Carter administration, complete with vaporous moralizing and foreign policy bungling.

Emmett Tyrrell

Image

Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

Gertrude Atherton

Image

All men are fools, if truth be told, but the ones in motley are more amusing than ones with crowns.

Anonymous

Image

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets…

W. H. Auden

It's always amusing to see how much less the political class knows than the rest of us do. ... it's never occurred to [the…

Stephen D. Cox

Image

Are there bears in these mountains?" he asked. His companion nodded. "Of course. But it's a bit early in the year for them to be moving around. Why?" Halt let go a long breath. "Just a vague hope, really. There's a chance that when the Temujai here you crashing around in the trees, they might think you're a bear." Erak…

John Flanagan