A Quote by H. L. Mencken

There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.

H. L. Mencken

Quote Topics

America Fashions Institutions Only

Quote Author

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

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.

Jane Jacobs

Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.

Dionne Brand

Fashions come and fashions go, but pockets are usually the same. There's little change in them.

Sam Ewing

Scientific fashions last longer than women's fashions but not as long as men's

Erwin Chargaff

I never thought I was somebody that would be on the cover of magazines in fashions, wearing fashions. It's like not me. But that is what movie stardom entails.

Meryl Streep

The funny thing is that the fashions from the '90s seem to sit so well with the fashions of 2016. Everything from then somehow skipped and came back.

Edward Enninful

In part, it's almost surely a failure of modern education, whether K through 12 or higher education, or really both. Barack Obama went to Ivy League institutions like Columbia, which are reputed to be among America's top colleges. And yet, this very recent product of those American institutions is not publicly articulating an appreciation of the American founding or the founders and their vision for America.

Paul Kengor

Being in the music business, if we couldn't pull the fashions from designers and if designers couldn't use artists to show off their fashions, where would we be?

Tina Knowles

We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.

Muhammad Yunus

Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all

Thomas Kuhn

We must nevertheless present all possible interpretations for each observation, so that competing theories can be formulated and defended. In science, as elsewhere, intellectual inertia, the fashions of the moment, the weight of institutions, and authoritarianism are always to be feared. Heresies play an essential role by keeping our minds argumentative and alert.

Hubert Reeves

The Aristocratic Institutions of England [had] acted much like the Slavery Institutions of America... [in] demoralis[ing] large classes outside their own special boundaries... [in producing] a long habit of submission... [and in] enfeebl[ing] by corrupting those who should assail them.

John Bright

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

George Bernard Shaw

A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.