H.L. Mencken Quotes (74 Quotes)


    Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm

    For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.

    The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality

    Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives

    Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan


    So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is

    When women kiss it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands

    Democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces

    The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession

    The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers

    Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

    Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking

    A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century

    Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.

    The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating

    I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms

    And out of each (schoolhouse) is vomited the standard product of the New Pedagogy - an endless procession of adolescents who have been taught everything save that which is true, and outfitted with every trick save those that are socially useful

    In the youth of every man there comes over him a sudden yearning to be a good fellow to be Bill or Jim to multitudes, and to go down into legend with Sir John Falstaff and Tom Jones

    Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent-slimy, sneaking and abominable.

    No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and even more of national prejudice.

    No one in this world, so far as I know has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people

    At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary airlanes and has an absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discov

    An individual who forces himself to accept this or that idea, or who pretends to accept this or that idea, not only on the ground that believing in it is an act of virtue, but also on the ground that doing so is prudent, is both a fool and a knave

    I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.


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