Quotes from H.L. Mencken
1. All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I
take it anyhow.
2. The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for
the urge to rule it.
3. The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
4. The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his
ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
6. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be
happy.
7. The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over
the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how
violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little
to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.
8. Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to
see them misunderstood.
9. Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said
briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of
solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting
individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
10. War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world
with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
11. Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that
all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I
should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
12. 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.
13. Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men
he knows to be idiots.
14. It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and
everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their
one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious
diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt
endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere
suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen,
John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin
searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.
15. It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that
counts.
16. Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in
knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against
change...The progress of humanity, far from being the result of
government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face
if its constant and bitter opposition.
17. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness
to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
18. God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the
miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a
kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set
the above their betters.
19. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and
that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for
happiness.
20. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense
and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is
beautiful and his children smart.
21. The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it
coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned
proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.
22. The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an
error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and
truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the
world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply
another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
23. No one in this world, so far as I know- and I have researched the
records for years, and employed agents to help me- has ever lost
money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of
the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
24. All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in
virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of
every industrious and well-disposed man.
25. The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive
and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country
more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest
of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning
to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
26. Nature abhors a moron.
27. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American
law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be
trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
28. The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save
humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running
flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
29. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will
probably fail again.
30. Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
31. I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but
it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where
free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't
think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a
right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a
right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be
a nuisance to his neighbors.
32. The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is
obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented,
which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be
prevented.
33. To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish
a woman for a purely moral reason.
34. We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
35. The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it
in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.
36. The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to
annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that
we mainly have.
37. The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is
often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there
is no limit to oppression.
38. No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the
secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old,
it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright
idiotic.
39. 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.
40. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that
even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any
man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized.
This assumption is quite erroneous...The great masses of men, even
in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the
dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are
cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is
worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural
desire among them to increase their knowledge.
41. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in
the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men.
Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's
possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and
destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every
new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker
who got into their hands.
42. We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in
the race in general, but as something going on in a small
minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and
then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have
an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a
Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great
Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a
few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.
43. The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and
mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority
that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast
majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against
them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual
heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority
only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do
with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is
apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not
apprehended at all.
44. 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.
45. 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.
