Famous Quotes | At a time when the respectable...

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. - H.L. (Henry Lewis) Mencken
Attribution: H.L. (Henry Lewis) Mencken (1880–1956), U.S. journalist, critic. Newspaper Days, preface, p. ix, Knopf (1941). Autobiography, vol. 2.

Categories: Critic, Education, Journalist, Newspapers And Magazines

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