Henry Louis Mencken Quotes on Man (7 Quotes)

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

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.

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without ... the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.