Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

A kiss on the beach when there is a full moon is the closest thing to heaven.

Worth |

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

The 3 most powerful resources you have available to you: love, prayer and forgiveness.

Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour?all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.

Men |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

Worth |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Every contribution to human progress on record has been made by some individual who differed sharply from the general, and was thus, almost, superior to the general. Perhaps the palpably insane must be excepted here, but I can think of no others. Such exceptional individuals should be permitted, it seems to me, to enjoy every advantage that goes with their superiority... The rest are as negligible as the race of cockroaches, who have gone unchanged for a million years.

Man | Wise |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.

Worth |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss of humanity.

Man | Mind |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Hate | Little | Think |

Gustave Flaubert

We were Red Romantics, perfectly ridiculous to be sure, but in full bloom. The little good which remains to me comes from that epoch.

Day | Work |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Jury: A group of twelve man who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Worth |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Democracy is the pathetic belief in the wisdom of collective ignorance.

Work |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

Hate |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Worth |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.

Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Men | Wise |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.

Man | Wise |

Hannah Arendt

Kant... stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge... to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.

Work |