H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
-
Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
-
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
-
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.
-
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
-
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
-
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.
-
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.
-
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.
-
Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
-
The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
-
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
-
Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.
-
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
-
Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.
-
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
-
The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
-
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
-
Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
-
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
-
People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
-
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
-
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.
-
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.