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Quotes from Prejudices, Third Series — H. L. Mencken

1880–1956 United States

← All quotes by H. L. Mencken

10 quotes

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

I do not object to being denounced, but I can't abide being schoolmastered, especially by men I regard as imbeciles.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastness and grab it by the tail.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: H. L. Mencken (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.