H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 22

• 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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• 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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• One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

  H. L. Mencken

  Smart, Reader, Thousand

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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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• The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.

  H. L. Mencken

  Evil, Democracy, Doctrine

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Might, Information, Proof

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• All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.

  H. L. Mencken

  Equality, Equal, Denied

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• For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.

  H. L. Mencken

  Trust, Mutual Interest, Together

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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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• By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally
  and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists?

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Men, Issues

  The American Mercury, February 1926.

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• Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.

  H. L. Mencken

  Views, May, Balloons

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• Citizenship in New York is now worth no more than citizenship in Arkansas, for it is open to any applicant from the marshes of Bessarabia, and, still worse, to any applicant from Arkansas.

  H. L. Mencken

  New York, Arkansas, Citizenship

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

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• One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.

  H. L. Mencken

  Liars, Lying, Eye

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.325, Vintage

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• Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

  H. L. Mencken

  Government, Trying, May

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• Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Truth, Freedom, Philosophy

  H.L. Mencken “A little book in C major”, Рипол Классик

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