H.L. Mencken

Quotes

• “School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible t...”
• “I have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make...”
• “Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of...”
• “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes h...”
• “Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects...”
• “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the p...”
• “Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm ...”
• “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On s...”
• “But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I bel...”
• “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really ...”
• “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever...”
• “Morality and honor are not to be confused. "The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter reg...”
• “We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-ci...”
• “He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is ther...”
• “Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and th...”
• “Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom a...”
• “Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what me...”
• “American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions ar...”
• “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endl...”
• “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I be...”
• “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and...”
• “I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of gove...”
• “Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of M...”
• “Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is r...”
• “The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idioti...”
• “One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character.”
• “A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.”
• “There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.”
• “Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
• “The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
• “Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”
• “The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.”
• “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
• “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”
• “Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”
• “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
• “After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.”
• “There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.”
• “There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”
• “Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.”
• “On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.”
• “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
• “Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”
• “When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
• “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
• “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
• “A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.”
• “A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.”
• “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
• “Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.”