A Quote by H. L. Mencken

The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.

H. L. Mencken

Quote Topics

Morons Peasants Primates Surrounded

Quote Author

H. L. Mencken
American - Writer
September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956

We are placed in the genus of Homo, which is Latin for man - Homo sapiens: supposedly wise men. I sometimes think - wonder - whether we really are wise men.

Donald Johanson

The female of genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

You don't have to be a genius when you're surrounded by morons.

Josh Lieb

If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe.

Richard Preston

I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12" x 8" black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.

Margaret Halsey

Are the different species defined by paleontologists - Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens - all part of the same gene pool or not?

Bryan Sykes

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Primates stand at a turning point in the course of evolution. Primates are to the biologist what viruses are to the biochemist. They can be analysed and partly understood according to the rules of a simpler discipline, but they also present another level of complexity: viruses are living chemicals, and primates are animals who love and hate and think.

Alison Jolly

God is not related to creatures as though belonging to a different "genus," but as transcending every "genus," and as the principle of all "genera.

Thomas Aquinas

I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I'm very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.

Al Jourgensen

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

Mary McCarthy

Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportional to its size, and all of them together forming a system of vallies, communicating with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join the principal valley on too high or too low a level; a circumstance which would be infinitely improbable if each of these vallies were not the work of the stream that flows in it.

John Playfair

It is of man's essence to create materially and morally, to fabricate things and to fabricate himself. Homo faber is the definition I propose ... Homo faber, Homo sapiens, I pay my respects to both, for they tend to merge.