\
  The most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world.
BackRefresh Options Favorite

HL Mencken is seriously the most 180 writer & wit in US history

and yes I have heard of Mark Twain. Here are a few exampl...
Buff sneaky criminal
  04/12/13
Ah, I was all about to be like "(Guy who never read Mar...
Contagious Autistic Corner Blood Rage
  04/12/13
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. Th...
Buff sneaky criminal
  04/12/13
Convince me Mencken isn't a Nietzschean epigone
clear gas station
  04/12/13
Mencken is funnier, but clearly he read a lot of Nietzsche.
Buff sneaky criminal
  04/12/13
great
light hall electric furnace
  03/29/14
Sounds like a shitlib. There is no progress in morals.
carmine church building knife
  05/14/24
(2014 xo v 2024 xo)
Marvelous Meetinghouse
  05/14/24
...
Fuchsia at-the-ready rehab idiot
  04/12/13
These are far from his best lines breh
Fuchsia at-the-ready rehab idiot
  04/12/13
these are lines I encountered in 4 hours of reading Mencken....
Buff sneaky criminal
  04/12/13
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of t...
sick really tough guy double fault
  04/12/13
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert o...
Buff sneaky criminal
  04/12/13
eh
Khaki Hairy Legs
  04/12/13
...
Fighting rigor
  05/14/24
(david simon)
Sexy hot toilet seat
  04/12/13
[T]he American people, taking one with the other, are the mo...
Buff sneaky criminal
  04/12/13
...
beady-eyed swollen nursing home
  03/29/14
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, ...
flickering elite market newt
  04/15/14
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ev...
flickering elite market newt
  04/15/14
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have ...
flickering elite market newt
  04/15/14
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-t...
flickering elite market newt
  04/15/14
Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to incre...
flickering elite market newt
  04/15/14
Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one...
flickering elite market newt
  04/15/14
...
razzle property
  05/14/24
...
dull french brunch becky
  05/14/24
idk if pithy zingers make one a great writer. if they did, t...
Fighting rigor
  05/14/24
He could also actually write good fiction. Mencken is a fake...
Unhinged psychic
  05/14/24
...
Fighting rigor
  05/14/24
I have been to his house in Baltimore. Sadly deep in ghetto ...
Amber roast beef
  05/14/24
I thought he made kitchen knives
Up-to-no-good institution pervert
  05/14/24


Poast new message in this thread



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 4:59 PM
Author: Buff sneaky criminal

and yes I have heard of Mark Twain.

Here are a few examples:

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

---

he has thousands of lines like this

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985387)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:16 PM
Author: Contagious Autistic Corner Blood Rage

Ah, I was all about to be like "(Guy who never read Mark Twain)"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985478)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:00 PM
Author: Buff sneaky criminal

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985396)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:06 PM
Author: clear gas station

Convince me Mencken isn't a Nietzschean epigone

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985424)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:09 PM
Author: Buff sneaky criminal

Mencken is funnier, but clearly he read a lot of Nietzsche.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985435)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 29th, 2014 10:29 PM
Author: light hall electric furnace

great

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25287206)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 4:05 PM
Author: carmine church building knife

Sounds like a shitlib. There is no progress in morals.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661306)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 8:37 PM
Author: Marvelous Meetinghouse

(2014 xo v 2024 xo)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47662053)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:00 PM
Author: Fuchsia at-the-ready rehab idiot



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985398)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:01 PM
Author: Fuchsia at-the-ready rehab idiot

These are far from his best lines breh

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985402)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:02 PM
Author: Buff sneaky criminal

these are lines I encountered in 4 hours of reading Mencken. His best quotes are everywhere.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985409)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:01 PM
Author: sick really tough guy double fault

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985405)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:03 PM
Author: Buff sneaky criminal

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians — and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe — that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985414)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:04 PM
Author: Khaki Hairy Legs

eh

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985417)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 3:57 PM
Author: Fighting rigor



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661273)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:05 PM
Author: Sexy hot toilet seat

(david simon)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985420)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 12th, 2013 5:07 PM
Author: Buff sneaky criminal

[T]he American people, taking one with the other, are the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the Middle Ages.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#22985425)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 29th, 2014 10:19 PM
Author: beady-eyed swollen nursing home



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25287131)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 15th, 2014 7:17 PM
Author: flickering elite market newt

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25389120)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 15th, 2014 7:18 PM
Author: flickering elite market newt

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? . . . They are laughing at Nietzsche yet . . .

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25389126)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 15th, 2014 7:19 PM
Author: flickering elite market newt

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25389129)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 15th, 2014 7:19 PM
Author: flickering elite market newt

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25389131)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 15th, 2014 7:20 PM
Author: flickering elite market newt

Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? ... it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. … I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25389137)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 15th, 2014 7:23 PM
Author: flickering elite market newt

Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#25389154)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 9:38 PM
Author: razzle property



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47662192)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 3:52 PM
Author: dull french brunch becky



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661258)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 3:58 PM
Author: Fighting rigor

idk if pithy zingers make one a great writer. if they did, then ambrose bierce would have to be up there

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661277)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 4:44 PM
Author: Unhinged psychic

He could also actually write good fiction. Mencken is a fake Liberal Artist.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661417)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 4:47 PM
Author: Fighting rigor



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661422)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 4:48 PM
Author: Amber roast beef

I have been to his house in Baltimore. Sadly deep in ghetto territory. The surrounding neighborhood is great for modern day urban archeology. Look! There used to be a decent middle class neighborhood!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661428)



Reply Favorite

Date: May 14th, 2024 4:49 PM
Author: Up-to-no-good institution pervert

I thought he made kitchen knives

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2[/quote#47661431)