"Bridges would not be safer if only..." - Quote by H L Mencken
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
More by H L Mencken
“The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.”
“A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.”
“The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.”
More on Knowledge
“If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.”
“To take what you know for what you know, and what you do not know for what you do not know, that is knowledge indeed.”
“I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.”