H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Quotes

• Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

• ...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

• And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

• Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

• To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

• There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.

• After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

• For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

• All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

• Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

• Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

• Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

• 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.

• A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

• A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

• A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

• Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.