Quote #34

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.

More from H. L. Mencken

  1. All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is …
  2. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young wo…
  3. The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
  4. There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
  5. Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
  6. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
  7. Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
  8. Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

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