H. L. Mencken Quotes About Eyes

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Girl, Memories, Kindness

  Smart Set, Dec. 1921

• In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

  H. L. Mencken

  Eye, Wind, Office

• There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]

  H. L. Mencken

  Eye, Science, Conquer The World

• [C]lass consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite-the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moronrun through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Real, Eye

• What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.

  H. L. Mencken

  Clever, Eye, Psych

  The American Mercury Magazine, p. 136, May 1933.

• Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

  H. L. Mencken

  Music, Girl, Eye

• One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.

  H. L. Mencken

  Liars, Lying, Eye

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.325, Vintage

• Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.

  H. L. Mencken

  Hero, Eye, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Notes On Democracy”, p.27, Knopf

• Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

  H. L. Mencken

  Eye, May, Youth

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