H. L. Mencken Quotes About Determination
-
The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.
→ -
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
→ -
One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.
→ -
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
→
Related Authors
-
Jim Webb Former United States Senator -
George Bernard Shaw Playwright -
Clarence Darrow Lawyer -
Rod Dreher Writer -
Will Rogers Actor -
Mark Twain Author -
Richard Wright Author -
Ambrose Bierce Journalist -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Albert J. Nock Author -
Theodore Dreiser Novelist -
Sinclair Lewis Novelist -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
George Jean Nathan Critic -
Robert Green Ingersoll Lawyer -
John T. Scopes Teacher -
P. J. O'Rourke Satirist -
Hunter S. Thompson Journalist -
William F. Buckley, Jr. Author -
Ayn Rand Novelist