H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
-
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
-
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
-
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
-
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
-
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
-
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
-
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
-
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
-
I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.
-
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
-
The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
-
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-
A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
-
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.
-
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
-
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
-
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
-
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
-
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
-
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.
-
That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.