People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody t...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
HENRY LOUIS GATES The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
HENRY LOUIS GATES So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of bla...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the Uni...
HENRY LOUIS GATES In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil ri...
HENRY LOUIS GATES If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class n...
HENRY LOUIS GATES You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
HENRY LOUIS GATES What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-c...
HENRY LOUIS GATES But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some ve...
HENRY LOUIS GATES People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a...
HENRY LOUIS GATES The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending dis...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and sca...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
HENRY LOUIS GATES Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping ot...
HENRY LOUIS GATES All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their an...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
HENRY LOUIS GATES Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in t...
HENRY LOUIS GATES The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European trad...
HENRY LOUIS GATES One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
HENRY LOUIS GATES My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the ster...
HENRY LOUIS GATES My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, t...
HENRY LOUIS GATES There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the rec...
HENRY LOUIS GATES For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word i...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity...
HENRY LOUIS GATES The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.
HENRY LOUIS GATES Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class wit...
HENRY LOUIS GATES We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an Af...
HENRY LOUIS GATES My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent cha...
HENRY LOUIS GATES The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United State...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identitie...
HENRY LOUIS GATES You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ance...
HENRY LOUIS GATES So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the pu...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader w...
HENRY LOUIS GATES My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another bl...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but th...
HENRY LOUIS GATES No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as &#...
HENRY LOUIS GATES So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a be...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult ...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout rem...
HENRY LOUIS GATES I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justi...
HENRY LOUIS GATES Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which h...
HENRY LOUIS Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think becau...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the pr...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. B...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Adultery is the application of democracy to love
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nic...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The Liberals have many tails, and chase them all
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN If you want peace, work for justice.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Idealist: One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will als...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Bachelors know more about women than married men do. If they didn't, they'd be married too.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Going to school does not make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a ca...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN You can't kiss an oil well.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expe...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Belief in our mortality, the sense that we are eventually going to crack up and be extinguished like...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as s...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN All government, of course, is against liberty.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though sh...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other a...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had an...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing they marry later; for another thing they...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionarie...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The American people, taken one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, i...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adr...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from ad...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and mis...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite eas...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN [Rudolph Valentino was] what is commonly called for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Va...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Men are sad because they have to die so soon, women are sad because they were born so long ago.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN An individual who forces himself to accept this or that idea, or who pretends to accept this or that...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scien...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a d...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Say what you want about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that th...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN He marries best who puts it off until it is too late
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Theology-An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Church: A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will n...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a litt...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN When women kiss, it always reminds one of prizefighters shaking hands
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN He (the businessman) is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are wo...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN There is a bird that knows no closed season - and if he won't come down to Texas oil stock, or one-n...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN When women kiss it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every h...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid fo...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice s...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Gynecologists: perhaps the most ignorant class of men, when it comes to knowledge of women, in the c...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as ha...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN No normal man ever fell in love after 30 when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN People will believe what they want to believe
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Change is not progress
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were i...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintell...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common hones...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Old age ain't no place for sissies.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A professional politician is a professionally dishonourable man. In order to get anywhere near high ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterili...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-c...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-hor...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christian...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to d...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better p...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for idea...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound c...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. W...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexpl...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN He uses his sources as a drunkard uses lampposts; not to light him upon his way, but to dissimulate ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to k...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just afte...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is s...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothi...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN