H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 36

• The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

  H. L. Mencken

  Race, Intellectual, Minorities

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• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

  H. L. Mencken

  History, Historical, Novelists

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

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• The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Ends, Motive, Thinness

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• The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Modern Life, Baptists

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• War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sports, Peace, War

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• The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Want, Common

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• The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!

  H. L. Mencken

  Home, Thinking, History

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• The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

  H. L. Mencken

  Experts, Pedants, Logic

  "Clinical Notes". "The American Mercury" Magazine, (p. 75), January 1924.

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• Fame: an embalmer trembling with stage fright.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fame, Stage, Trembling

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.617, Vintage

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• The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Essence, Breathing

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• During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, New York, Years

  H. L. Mencken (1924). “Prejudices Fourth Series”

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• After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.

  H. L. Mencken

  Responsibility, Goes On, World

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.221, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Men, Broken

  H.L. Mencken (1920). “Prejudices Second Series”

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• The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

  H. L. Mencken

  Lying, Men, Progress

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• One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Determination, Adventure

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

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• The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.

  H. L. Mencken

  Yesterday, Speech, Politics

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• The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.

  H. L. Mencken

  Competition, Television, Paper

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• I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.

  H. L. Mencken

  Editors, Helping, Convinced

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• A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, People, Political

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

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• Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Atheism, Rivals

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• The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, War, Men

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• The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheism, Facts, World

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.71, Vintage

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• There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Dog, Rain

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• The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Games, Ease

  H.L. Mencken (1920). “Prejudices Second Series”

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• We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.

  H. L. Mencken

  War, Thinking, Break Through

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