H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 21

• Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, Running, Thinking

  "Minority Report".

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• The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

  H. L. Mencken

  Music, Feelings, Mirth

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.524, Vintage

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• The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.

  H. L. Mencken

  Heart, Thinking, Acting

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• The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Character, Men, Ideas

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• The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dog, Men, Average

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.86, Knopf

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• There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

  H. L. Mencken

  Business, Simple Solutions, Neat And Tidy

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.443, Vintage

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• My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

  H. L. Mencken

  Science, Race, Ideas

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.20, Knopf

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• The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

  H. L. Mencken

  Husband, Children, Father

  H. L. Mencken (2015). “In Defense of Women: Human Sexuality”, p.42, 谷月社

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• The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.

  H. L. Mencken

  Law, Pockets, Faces

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• All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.

  H. L. Mencken

  Winning, People, Influence

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• All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Sports, Horse

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• Don't tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to from his wife. Simply tell me how he makes his living. It is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spring, Work, Character

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.20, Vintage

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• To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse, 10 times as ignorant, 10 times as unfair and tyrannical, 10 times as complaisant and pusillanimous, and 10 times as devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, Pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd and dishonest.

  H. L. Mencken

  Average, Ignorant, Belief

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• The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

  H. L. Mencken

  Punishment, Ideas, Dubious

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.265, Knopf

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• Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.

  H. L. Mencken

  Government, Liberty, Citizens

  H. L. MENCKEN (1924). “PREJUDICES FOURTH SERIES”

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• I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.

  H. L. Mencken

  Marriage, Years, Two

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• I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Ideas, Four

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• The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass.

  H. L. Mencken

  Teacher, Average, Ass

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• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Philosophy, Science

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.55, Knopf

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• What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor

  H. L. Mencken

  Punishment, May, Morality

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• Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

  H. L. Mencken

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Intellectual

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.616, Vintage

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• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Regret, Character, Men

  Prejudices, Fourth Series ch. 11 (1924)

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• The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties

  H. L. Mencken

  Decision, Demand, Decision Making

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• Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

  H. L. Mencken

  College, Damage, Might

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• [C]lass consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite-the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moronrun through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Real, Eye

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