H. L. Mencken Quotes About Books

• I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Men, Drunk

  Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

• The truth is . . . that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Book, Reading

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

• The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Book, Reading

  "A little book in C major".

• In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Book, Reading

  "A little book in C major".

• Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

  H. L. Mencken

  Success, Crazy, Book

• The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Military, War

• The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Reading, Animal

  Notebooks (1956) "Minority Report"

• After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Book, Writing

• There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Men, People

  Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

• The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, School, Sunday

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.202, Vintage

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Race, Years

  H. L. Mencken (2003). “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.57, See Sharp Press

• Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Book, America

• Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Hero, Four

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.221, Vintage

• One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sister, Book, Smirk

  H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.98, Рипол Классик

• I am never much interested in the effects of what I write....I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my...books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Writing, Two

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