H. L. Mencken Quotes

We can scarcely hate any one that we know.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinion.

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.

What I have always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It is probably nothing more than the affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and their good opinion of me.

I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race.

I just feel like we as a human race tend to fear that which we don't understand. It's cause for a lot of bad things and bad behavior to exist on the planet. Artists have a way of touching people and changing minds in a way that sometimes other mediums don't.

Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show the darkness but to put out our own eyes.

In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice.

He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any.

I believe that nothing should be taboo - no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to a discovery.

When you label somebody and put them in a box, then you put the lid on the box, and you just never look inside again. I think it's much more interesting for human beings to look at each other's stories and see each other. Really see each other and then see themselves through other people's stories. That's where you start to break down stereotypes.

I connect with very few close friends in real life.

Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias.

We would be the worst of fools if we would ever lose this extraordinary capacity to go beyond the limits of past thought and past prejudices.

I need to recognise that everyone is an individual and that the key to a good relationship is to recognise that. This does theme to be a theme in my stand-up as well as my writing!

A good life depends on the strength of our relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers.

I love people that kind of have those life experiences that take them different places.

Society, dead or alive, can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.

We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy or plots.

In a social environment that is ever crowded and impersonal, it is becoming increasingly important to reconsider the value of close personal relationships before we are driven to ask the forlorn question, 'Whatever happened to love?'

I always knew one thing, that life is made bearable and possible and liveable by the relations of one human being to another, the individual love and gentleness between persons, or in any case, the unbreakable bond that grows and fastens lives together in all sorts of mysterious ways.

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.