H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 22

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

  H. L. Mencken

  Political, Democracy, Life Is

  'Baltimore Evening Sun' 9 December 1929

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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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• No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

  H. L. Mencken

  Walking Sticks, Lynching, Revolution

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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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• The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Blue, Proof

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• The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, Ideas, Evil

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.80, Vintage

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• One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

  H. L. Mencken

  Smart, Reader, Thousand

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• Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Tissues, Pressure

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• The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

  H. L. Mencken

  Truth, Learning, Knowledge

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.311, Knopf

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• It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Style, Stuff

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• No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

  H. L. Mencken

  Marriage, Men, Scotch Whisky

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• When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.

  H. L. Mencken

  Death, Doubt, Shade

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• Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

  H. L. Mencken

  Ideas, Cynical, Literature

  A Book of Burlesques ch. 11 (1920)

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• If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

  H. L. Mencken

  Literature, Allan Poe, Critics

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• American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Achievement, Journalism

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.95, Knopf

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• There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Discovery, Joy

  H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.85, Рипол Классик

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• No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched 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 any one ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, Running, Mistake

  Chicago Tribune, 19 Sept. 1926.

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