H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
-
Syllogisms а la mode - If you are against labor racketeers, then you are against the working man. If you are against demagogues, then you are against democracy. If you are against Christianity, then you are against God. If you are against trying a can of Old Dr. Quack's Cancer Salve, then you are in favor of letting Uncle Julius die.
-
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
-
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
-
It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
-
The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.
-
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
-
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
-
The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
-
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
-
[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
-
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
-
[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
-
The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
-
One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.
-
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
-
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
-
No man ever entered the White House under the burden of a more inconvenient past. And no President was ever denounced with greater ferocity. - said of Andrew Jackson
-
The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
-
Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
-
We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
-
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
-
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
-
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.