To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
H. L. MenckenA man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
H. L. MenckenThe older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
H. L. MenckenMen are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
H. L. MenckenIt is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
H. L. MenckenThis passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.
H. L. Mencken