Jon > Jon's Quotes

“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald