This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You must - do you hear me, young man? - You must work more than you are doing!
Right |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
People | Popularity |
You must not think that feeling is everything? Art is nothing without form.
Right |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Eugenics is the theory that charm in a woman is the same as charmed in a prize-fighter.
Need |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I, but the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air?that progress made under the shadow of the policeman?s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. 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 yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave? In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen? I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.
Creativity | Energy | Enthusiasm | Freedom | Good | People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
Controversy | Love | People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
People |
When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds ? like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.
People |
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
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 believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.