Quotes by
H.L. Mencken |
1880-1956 , American columnist & cultural critic
American journalist, satirist and cultural criticKnown as the “Sage of Baltimore”, he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements.
As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States.
| 89 quotes | 12,739 visits |
Quotations
| • | Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. 23 |
| • | Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. 22 |
| • | Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right. 20 |
| • | The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. 17 |
| • | Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses. 16 |
| • | Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. 15 |
| • | It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. 14 |
| • | Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. 13 |
| • | Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. 13 |
| • | Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage. 12 |
| • | If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God. 12 |
| • | Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. 11 |
| • | The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. 11 |
| • | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. 10 |
| • | Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. 10 |
| • | The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. 10 |
| • | It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. 9 |
| • | Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. 9 |
| • | The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians. 9 |
| • | When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money. 9 |
| • | An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. 7 |
| • | There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal. 7 |
| • | Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. 6 |
| • | All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. 6 |
| • | A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. 6 |
| • | I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. 6 |
| • | If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder. 6 |
| • | In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft. 6 |
| • | Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution? 6 |
| • | Never drink before sunset; Never drink more than 3 days in a row. 6 |
| • | The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. 6 |
| • | The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology. 6 |
| • | There is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong. 6 |
| • | You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. 6 |
| • | A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it. 6 |
| • | Adultery is the application of democracy to love. 5 |
| • | Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. 5 |
| • | Criticism is prejudice made plausible. 5 |
| • | Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly. 5 |
| • | The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. 5 |
| • | What men value in this world is not rights but privileges. 5 |
| • | A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. 4 |
| • | For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. 4 |
| • | It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. 4 |
| • | It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. 4 |
| • | Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. 4 |
| • | Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. 4 |
| • | Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God. 4 |
| • | Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. 4 |
| • | The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. 4 |
| • | The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. 4 |
| • | The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. 4 |
| • | There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind. 4 |
| • | To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! 4 |
| • | We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. 4 |
| • | After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. (on Shakespeare) 3 |
| • | A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid. 3 |
| • | A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know. 3 |
| • | Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. 3 |
| • | I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. 3 |
| • | I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine. 3 |
| • | Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead. 3 |
| • | New York: A third-rate Babylon. 3 |
| • | Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian. 3 |
| • | A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. 2 |
| • | A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas. 2 |
| • | Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh. 2 |
| • | Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. 2 |
| • | Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another. 2 |
| • | One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms. 2 |
| • | The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. 2 |
| • | The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore. 2 |
| • | The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. 2 |
| • | Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. 2 |
| • | The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. |
| • | The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer. |
| • | Genius: the ability to prolong one’s childhood. |
| • | I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey. |
| • | The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor. |
| • | 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. |
| • | After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done. |
| • | The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights. |
| • | The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. |
| • | The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. |
| • | The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. |
| • | When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel. |
| • | The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading. |
| • | Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't, they'd be married, too. |
| • | It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism. |
