H. L. Mencken Quotes About Birth

• I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.

  H. L. Mencken

  Teacher, Determination, School

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.260, Cosimo, Inc.

• Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Thinking, Long Ago

• Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

  H. L. Mencken

  Encouragement, Birth Rate, Democracy

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