H. L. Mencken Quotes About Suffering

• We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.

  H. L. Mencken

  Ideas, White, House

• Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Men, Suffering

• How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Laughter, Shoes

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

• The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Government, Class

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.91, Knopf

• To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Government, Lynching

• One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

  H. L. Mencken

  White, Justice, Diversity

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.271, Knopf

• A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Blood, Suffering

  "The 100 best nonfiction books: No 49 - The American Language by HL Mencken (1919)" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 9, 2017.

• [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

• High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.

  H. L. Mencken

  Suffering, Humanitarianism, Overestimate

• Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.

  H. L. Mencken

  Husband, Intelligent, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Diary of H. L. Mencken”, p.248, Vintage

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