Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. - H. L. Mencken

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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

H. L. Mencken

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About H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956), known as H. L. Mencken, was a twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Henry Louis Mencken

All quotes from H. L. Mencken Similar Quotes by other Originators

Originators like H. L. Mencken:

George Bernard Shaw Christopher Hitchens Gore Vidal Edmund Burke G. K. Chesterton

Additional quotes by H. L. Mencken

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it.