H. L. Mencken Quotes

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. ... A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously.

The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.

The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.

Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.

[Science] must be amoral by its very nature: The minute it begins separating facts into the two categories of good ones and bad ones it ceases to be science and becomes a mere nuisance, like theology.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

Remorse - Regret that one waited so long to do it.

There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.

The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.

Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.

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.

This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.

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

What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.

If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse - as aman shoots himself

One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.

The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.

Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.

A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor

I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.

Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.

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.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?

Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.

As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.