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H. L. Mencken
(Redirected from H.L. Mencken) H. L. Mencken Born: Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) American journalist and social critic
Sourced
- "There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong."
- "The Divine Afflatus", New York Evening Mail (November 16, 1917); later published in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
- "[W]hen a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental--men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... [A]ll the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre--the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
- Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920
Attributed
- No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
- No government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction…governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down…Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
- That Americans, in the mass, have anything properly described as keen wits is surely far from self-evident. On the contrary, it seems likely that, if anything, they lie below the civilised norm.
Truth and Justice
- Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
- Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
- It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
- Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
- The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
Democracy, Government, America and Newspapers
- Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
- It is a basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
- No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
- Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
- Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
- Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
- A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
- It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
- The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
- Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
- The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
- Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
- The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed--and hence clamorous to be led to safety--by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Preachers, Politicians, Lawyers and Teachers
- Liberals have many tails and chase them all.
- In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
- Lawyer: One who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
- Judge: A law student who marks his own papers.
- A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
- It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
- Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
- A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
- ...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of menial workers.
- The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
- Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking--actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.
- When the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.
Human condition
- The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
- Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
- Those who can—do. Those who can't—teach.
- The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
- The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
- A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know.
- A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
- An optimist is someone who upon finding that roses smell sweet, presumes that they would also make a good soup.
- Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
- Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- Jealousy: The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.
- Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
- T'is more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.
- Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.
- The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
- A man may be a fool and not know it—but not if he is married.
- A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
- Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
- Remorse—Regret that one waited so long to do it.
- For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Morality, Conscience, and Truth
- Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
- Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.
- Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
- Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
- Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
- Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
- Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
- The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
- The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth -- that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
Religion, Theology, God
- One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
- Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
- A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.
- We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
- ...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
- Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
- Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
- The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...
- It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.
- I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind -- that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
- Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
- Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
- The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.
- The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
- Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.
- It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
- I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
- Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
- Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
- Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
- To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
Other
- Historian (n.): An unsuccessful novelist.
- If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl.
- Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull.
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