H. L. Mencken Quotes

The public is too damned dumb to understand.

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria - anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.

There are nearly one billion illiterate people on Earth.

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.

… a barbarian who could not write one sentence of grammar.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause.

No one, however smart, however well educated … is the suppository of all wisdom.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

The average citizen in this county has more intelligence and sense in his little finger than the editor of 'The New York Times' has in his whole head.

People always put you in a box as a rapper, especially when I get up on a panel and start speaking, and I start speaking when I got some sense. They're like, 'Oh, well, I didn't expect him to have sense.'

I think people underestimate because I'm the rap guy, I'm a crazy guy, screaming all the time. But that doesn't mean that I'm not intelligent.

Genius, in one respect, is like gold; numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

I believe some people are just too damn smart to write fiction.

Look I'm politically correct, I went to a great school, I was a good student, look, I'm a smart guy.

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

People who think well, write well

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has any one ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

Stupidity is a luxury and you will find time and time and time and again that those who are overwhelmingly on the left are those who can afford to be.

If your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it's not that smart.

The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.