Quotes From H.L. Mencken
A celebrity
is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know. A cynic
is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. A home
is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities
of the people who live in it. A judge
is a law student who marks his own examination papers. A poet
more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. All men
are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit
it. I myself deny it. All successful
newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend
anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on
them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. All [zoos]
actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon
them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which
a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session,
is informing, stimulating and ennobling. An idealist
is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage,
concludes that it will also make better soup. Any man
who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them
misunderstood. Conscience
is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. Conscience
is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. Criticism
is prejudice made plausible. Democracy
is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve
to get it good and hard. Every decent
man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every normal
man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black
flag, and begin to slit throats. Faith may
be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the
improbable. For centuries,
theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. For it
is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human
associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make
us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that
same end. Giving
every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity
has made them good. I believe
that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely
a waste of time. I never
lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because
I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to
meet them. In the
United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite
device of persons with something to sell. Injustice
is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. It is even
harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from
man. 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. It is impossible
to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
It is now
quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort
to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics
or chemistry. It is the
dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. Love is
the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Man is
never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate,
often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the
rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for
human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also
makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and
intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. Men are
the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to
making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi
are called altruists. Misogynist:
A man who hates women as much as women hate one another. Never let
your inferiors do you a favor – it will be extremely costly. Nobody
ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
public. Philosophy
consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others
are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also
usually proves that he is one himself. Platitude:
an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that
is not true. Puritanism:
The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. 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 capacity
of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than
that of any other animal.
The chief
value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which
it is overestimated. The demagogue
is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows
to be idiots. The government
consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking
one with another, no special talent for the business of government;
they have only a talent for getting and holding office. The men
the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring
liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell
them the truth. The most
common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. The older
I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings
wisdom. The penalty
for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not
for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence. The trouble
with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's
time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive
laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning
if it is to be stopped at all. 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.
The world
always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical
with the discovery of truth – that the error and truth are
simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns
to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error,
and maybe one worse than the first one. To die
for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it
would be if men died for ideas that were true! 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. Unquestionably,
there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much
in taxes as he formerly got in wages. We are
here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. The difference
between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets
a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been
caught. Conscience
is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. After all,
all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. There is
always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat,
plausible, and wrong. May 12, 2010
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