The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956
Author · 9 quotes
Henry Louis Mencken, commonly known as H. L. Mencken, was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He is best known for his wit, acerbic commentary, and influential writings on politics, religion, and the American way of life, particularly during the early to mid-20th century.
1880–1956·lived 75 years
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.In Defense of Women, 1922
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.Prejudices: First Series, p. 191, 1920
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.Mencken Chrestomathy, 2012
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.What I Believe, The Forum, September 1930
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 145, 1949
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.The Average Civilized Man of Today: Thoughts By H.L. Mencken, 1924
That’s all 9 quotes by H. L. Mencken.