H. L. Mencken Quotes About College

• College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.

  H. L. Mencken

  Football, Humorous, Loss

• I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

  H. L. Mencken

  Intelligent, Boys, College

• It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dog, Humor, Dark

  "On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1956.

• As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.

  H. L. Mencken

  College, Thinking, Ymca

• Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

  H. L. Mencken

  College, Damage, Might

• Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.

  H. L. Mencken

  Boys, College, Succeed

• Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.

  H. L. Mencken

  Love, College, Love Is

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.620, Vintage

• At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, School, Night

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