H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 21

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Teacher, Average, Ass

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull

  H. L. Mencken

  Sex, Would Be, Dull

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Second Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.464, Vintage

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Decision, Demand, Decision Making

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• It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dog, Drinking, Beer

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• The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

  H. L. Mencken

  Horse, Cat, Gay

  "Clinical Notes". The American Mercury (January 1924), p. 75; later quoted in H. L. Mencken "Prejudices: Fourth Series", 1924.

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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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• Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness

  H. L. Mencken

  Conscience

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.35, Vintage

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• Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Thinking, Stupidity

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• I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom... [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Believe, Men

  "Letters of H. L. Mencken". Book edited by Guy J. Forgue, 1961.

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• Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.

  H. L. Mencken

  Character, Men, Contemporary Fiction

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fiction, Charm, Autobiography

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.415, Knopf

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• Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Life, Choices

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• The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell.

  H. L. Mencken

  Lonely, Truth, Lying

  1922 Prejudices, 3rd series, ch.14.

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• At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, School, Night

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