Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that.


Henry Louis Gates

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Are you taking us to the beach?" - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON
It looks ancient," - Amy Cahill
JUDE WATSON
It SMELLS ancient," - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON
Palm trees were fanned by a warm, light breeze, and they rolled down their windows to smell the sea.
JUDE WATSON
I can tell you that you will have your hearts broken more by the people you love than by the people ...
MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX
Let's head out to the ruins." - Dan Cahill
ROLAND SMITH
About f-f-ace!" she said to the horse, flailing with her boots. "Into the barn, please. It's time fo...
PETER LERANGIS
You see?" Damien leaned over his desk and spread out half a dozen charcoal sketches. "These are only...
RICK RIORDAN
I've got a few ideas," (Amy) admitted. "But I don't know where we're going in the long term. I mean ...
RICK RIORDAN
I'm still a big 'Grey's Anatomy' fan.
BROOKE ELLIOTT
I used to watch 'Grey's Anatomy' pretty religiously.
ERINN HAYES
Alas, I think I am becoming a god.
TITUS
Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
LUCAN
I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.
LUCAN
Love is saying you're sorry. It's the opposite of those cherub posters that say, 'Love i...
DIANE LANE
I'm proud to say that I was that guy playing the character of Dr. Burke on 'Grey's Anato...
ISAIAH WASHINGTON
37. It is better to be single and unhappy than unhappily married.
JAMES C. DOBSON
Don't have to see," the pilot grunted. "Olga knows the way."
"Funny name for an aircraft...
GORDON KORMAN
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
SENECA
Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
SENECA
We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.
SENECA
Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take...
SENECA
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA
Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.
SENECA
Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.
SENECA
You do stand-up because you have to do it. If you're doing it to become 'famous,' you...
RUSSELL PETERS
To stand on the
brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, ...
LOUIS C. K.
People always come up to me now and say, 'Watchmen' is the best superhero movie ever made.&#...
ZACK SNYDER
It's a juicy thing to say we're building a phone, which is why people want to write about it...
MARK ZUCKERBERG
It's never black and white on 'Game of Thrones.' If you think it's black and white, ...
MAISIE WILLIAMS
This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from Am...
ANGELA BASSETT
You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wro...
MALCOLM X
People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is wh...
NOEL COWARD
I've read stories of slave owners who were very generous. They didn't keep them in shackles,...
MICHAEL MOORE
I always find Victoria's Secret models a bit weird.
EDIE CAMPBELL
It's wrong, and it's racist, and it's bigoted to say that guns are quintessentially Amer...
ALAN DERSHOWITZ
When you're playing music, say for instance, you're playing a part of the band and you'r...
BILLY ECKSTINE
When I used to say I wanted to play at Wimbledon, they used to laugh in my face and say, 'What a...
SANIA MIRZA
Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong.
RON PAUL
You can't just sort of come with, say, 'Yesterday,' or 'A Hard Day's Night,'...
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER
What's wrong with the auto industry isn't that it failed to create jobs. What's wrong is...
AMITY SHLAES
I've heard people on panels say, 'You must have a Web site. You need to tweet. Repeat the ti...
MAUREEN JOHNSON
Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they'r...
JEFF LINDSAY
Some people believe they chose homosexuality, and some believe they didn't. Who's to say one...
LA'PORSHA RENAE
I think as you get older, you realize there's always going to be critics. Critics are going to w...
AARON RODGERS
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?'...
ELON MUSK
No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It'...
GARY WRIGHT
As a storyteller, you have to have something to say. You have to look at the world, think about it i...
JEFF NICHOLS
Fashion is fun, ridiculously fun. But it's base and it's wrong. You're not doing anythin...
WARIS DIRIE
If you're white and you're wrong, then you're wrong; if you're black and you're ...
BOB MARLEY
Mainly, I don't like it when music is made solely to impress people or in order to please busine...
JOHN FRUSCIANTE
People will come up to me everywhere and say, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Larry King,' and, '...
MATTIE STEPANEK
They got rid of bottled water. We got thermoses that say 'Grey's Anatomy Season 4' with ...
BROOKE SMITH
It's very easy for people to say what's wrong with education in Arizona, but if I'm elec...
DOUG DUCEY
One thing I've been thinking about is taking the social issues out of national politics. For exa...
JOE WURZELBACHER
Before 'Grey's Anatomy,' I was doing musicals, plays, commercials, you name it.
CHANDRA WILSON
When you're young and you're striving, it's all uphill, and it's easier to climb. Th...
RON HOWARD
Travel is one of the best anti-war weapons that there are. I've been to Iran, and if you're ...
VIGGO MORTENSEN
You can't control the fact that you are born a white man or born into wealth. When people say, &...
ROXANE GAY
I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and c...
MADONNA CICCONE
I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, ...
AKHIL SHARMA
When African-Americans come to France, the French show them more consideration than they would show ...
EUZHAN PALCY
'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different c...
TATIANA MASLANY
I would say for every successful black woman in America or in the world, really, it's difficult ...
JILL SCOTT
As they say in the bible, that you're supposed to rejoice when people die and mourn when they...
GREGG ALLMAN
I think, for the first time, people are starting to say, 'That's Sterling K. Brown,' whi...
STERLING K. BROWN
'Have fun' is my message. Be silly. You're allowed to be silly. There's nothing wron...
JIMMY FALLON
When you're young, you think that clothes are almost magical, and that if you wear the right thi...
NORA EPHRON
With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it's Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than t...
BOB NEWHART
And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of...
STEVE WYNN
That's the difference between the NCAA and the NFL right now. They've got to step up and say...
TONY DUNGY
It's great to wave the flag - I always say we're proud to be made in America - but I think o...
JOSEPH ABBOUD
'Reform' is pillage and plunder if you're against it, and it's good government if yo...
PETE LANEY
There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, 'Oh, you're playing yourself.' I gues...
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
I think that one of the things that we have to recognize is that the longer somebody doesn't hav...
KEVIN HASSETT
People say, 'Are you going to be beating up one side or the other side?' It's everybody....
CAMPBELL BROWN
The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: 'If the door's shut, don't come a-knock...
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
People who want to express themselves need to be given an opportunity. For me, it's a very funda...
BOB BUCKHORN
Western record companies haven't always dealt with African musicians in the best way. Giving the...
YOUSSOU N'DOUR
I really see food as subjective. It's a creative outlet. It's something that you do for fun....
GRAHAM ELLIOT
When you're onstage and the audience is smiling and singing and bopping along and you're all...
JOAN JETT
I've heard people say, 'Why do you have to do a show that's called 'Black Girls Rock...
TRACEE ELLIS ROSS
Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying t...
ZEDD
When you're a kid growing up, you say you want to make it to the Major Leagues, and when you rea...
JOE MORGAN
This is the great thing about Northern Ireland. I walk down the street and people stop me and say th...
RORY MCILROY
I wouldn't ever say if you're having tough times then there must be something wrong with you...
JOEL OSTEEN
When you're elected to Congress, you take a vow to uphold the Constitution and its system of che...
CHELLIE PINGREE
What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act?
CRAIG GROESCHEL
I say to the Occupy protesters - you're occupying the wrong place, you're protesting the wro...
SARAH PALIN
It's absolutely wrong that I don't want guys to challenge me. And the people who say that ar...
MICHAEL JORDAN
I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with ...
CLARENCE THOMAS
I know what it's like to be growing up, called 'deaf and mute' and 'deaf and dumb.&#...
MARLEE MATLIN
Honestly, when you're making a movie, you never say, 'Oh, this one's going to suck and g...
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Ev...
GEOFFREY CANADA
Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking so...
MOLLY CRABAPPLE
It bothers me when people say, 'Oh, you're so down to earth - for an actor.' Even when t...
JAKE GYLLENHAAL
And what I am trying to say to them that through our ads and through our discussions is if you don&#...
LEE SCOTT
When you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it's a cloudy day, I lo...
CAMPBELL BROWN
The beauty of science fiction is that it takes the audience's guard down; they're much more ...
DUNCAN JONES

More Henry Louis Gates

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
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
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
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