H. L. Mencken Quotes
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.
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The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.
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The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
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All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.
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The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
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A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.
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The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth inthe fairgrounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the Liberals.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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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.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.