Gadfly, your last sig was....?

[spielundspass]

Gadfly this is an unusual request of someone who doesn't post often but I was wondering I saw a really good signature of yours. It was the one just before the gun/vowel signature.
Its just that it was really witty and was hoping to use it on an essay but forgot to note it down as soon as I saw it.

If you can't remember it could you at least post me the source of where you quoted it from.

Thanks in advance.

[Gadfly2317]

Gadfly this is an unusual request of someone who doesn't post often but I was wondering I saw a really good signature of yours. It was the one just before the gun/vowel signature.
Its just that it was really witty and was hoping to use it on an essay but forgot to note it down as soon as I saw it.

If you can't remember it could you at least post me the source of where you quoted it from.

Thanks in advance.

Any hints as to what the topic was? Even vaguely? I could probably remember what it was with something to jog my memory.

[spielundspass]

The last thing I remember of it was that I think it concerned shadows but I'm not entirely sure.

[Gadfly2317]

Sorry, I don't recall for sure. I know I've recently used quotes from H.L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde, and Jules from Pulp Fiction. Here's the possible H.L. Mencken quotes. By the way, what is the topic, them, and thesis of your essay? I might be able to suggest a good quote, especially if you let me know the context or point you are trying to support.



Quotations by Author
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
US editor [more author details]

Showing quotations 1 to 30 of 57 total Next Page ->

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Cynicism]
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
H. L. Mencken
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Laws]
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Poetry]
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Lies]
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Journalism]
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
H. L. Mencken
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Idealism]
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Criticism] [Prejudice]
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Democracy]
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Government]
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
H. L. Mencken
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H. L. Mencken
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Religion]
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Trust]
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Government]
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
H. L. Mencken
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
H. L. Mencken
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. Mencken
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Golf]
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Love]
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
H. L. Mencken
Men 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. Mencken
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Men And Women]
Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.
H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Americans]
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Philosophy]
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Boredom]
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Money]
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Government]
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Age] [Wisdom]
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
H. L. Mencken
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Laws]
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Ideas]
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Democracy]
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Taxes]
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken, 'Prejudices: Fourth Series,' 1924
- More quotations on: [Honor] [Morality]
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
- More quotations on: [Quotations]
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/H._L._Mencken/