01c. 1918 ADThe basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
02c. 1918 ADIt takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
03c. 1918 ADA prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
05c. 1918 ADPenetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
06c. 1918 ADA cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
08c. 1918 ADA celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
10c. 1918 ADHuman life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
11c. 1918 ADMen have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
13c. 1918 AD'Tis more blessed to give than to receive for example wedding presents.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
15c. 1918 ADNo matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
16c. 1918 ADThe double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
17c. 1918 ADMorality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
18c. 1918 ADOpera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
19c. 1918 ADThe first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
20c. 1918 ADThe one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
21c. 1918 ADTo be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
23c. 1918 ADOne may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
24c. 1918 ADA Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.H.L. Mencken / quote ↗
