Skip to content

Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

— H. L. Mencken A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Another quote →

Topics

Money

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Smart Set (1910)

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

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.

All H. L. Mencken quotes →

You may also like

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: H. L. Mencken (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.