Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

 A great deal of ink is wasted in trying to discover and denounce my motive in being a critic at all. I am, by one theory, a German spy told off to flay, terrorize and stampede the Anglo-Saxon. By another I am a secret radical, while professing to admire Coolidge and Genghis Khan. By a third, I am a fanatical American chauvinist, bent upon defaming and ruining the motherland. All these notions are nonsense; only the first has even the slightest plausibility. The plain truth is–and how could it be plainer?–that I practice criticism for precisely the same reason that every other critic practices it: because I am a vain fellow, and have a great many ideas on all sorts of subjects, and like to put them into words and harass the human race with them. If I could confine this flow of ideas to one subject I’d be a professor and get some respect. If I could reduce it, say, to one idea a year, I’d be a novelist, a dramatist, or a newspaper editorial writer. But being unable to stanch the flux, and having, as I say, a vast and exigent vanity, I am a critic of books, and through books of Homo sapiens, and through Homo sapiens of God.
So much for the motive. What now for the substance? What is the fundamental faith beneath all the spurting and coruscating the ideas I have just mentioned? What do I primarily and immovably believe in, as a Puritan believes in Hell? I believe in liberty. And when I say liberty I mean the thing in its widest imaginable sense—liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and tolerable. I am against forbidding anybody to do anything, or say anything, or think anything, so long as it is possible to imagine a habitable world in which he would be free to do, say and think it. The burden of proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman, which is to say upon the lawmaker, the theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his case doubly, triply, quadruply, and then he must start all over and prove it again. The eye through which I view him is watery and jaundiced. I do not pretend to be "just" to him—any more than a Christian pretends to be just to the Devil. He is the enemy of everything I admire and respect in this world—of everything that makes it various and amusing and charming. He impedes every honest search for the truth. He stands against every sort of good will and common decency. His ideal is that of an animal trainer, an archbishop, a major-general in the Army. I am against him until the last galoot’s ashore.
The simple and childlike faith in the freedom and dignity of man–here, perhaps, stated with undue rhetoric–should be obvious, I should think, to every critic above the mental backwardness of a Federal judge… I know of no civilized country, indeed, in which liberty is less esteemed than it is in the United States today; certainly there is none in which more persistent efforts are made to limit it and put it down. I am thus, to Americans, a bad American, but to Europeans, still unaware of the practical effects of Wilson and the saloon-bouncer ethic of Roosevelt I, I seem to be an eloquent spokesman of the true American tradition. It is a joke, but the joke is not on me…
Liberty is not for slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it on men against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please…
For liberty, when one ascends to the levels where ideas swish by and men pursue Truth to grab her by the tail, is the first thing and the last thing. So long as it prevails the show is thrilling and stupendous; the moment it fails the show is a dull and dirty farce.

Salutory
The Editors propose, before jurisprudence develops to the point of prohibiting skepticism altogether… If they are convinced of anything beyond peradventure, it is, indeed, that many of the great problems of man, and particularly man as a member of society–are intrinsically insoluble–that insolubility is as much a part of their essence as it is of the essence of squaring the circle. But demonstrating this insolubility thus takes on something of the quality of establishing a truth, and even merely arguing it gathers a sort of austere virtue. For human progress is achieved, it must be manifest, not by wasting effort upon hopeless and exhausting enigmas, but by concentrating effort upon inquiries that are within the poor talents of man. In the field of politics, for example, utopianism is not only useless; it is dangerous, for it centers attention upon what ought too be at the expense of what might be. The American Mercury will devote itself pleasantly to exposing the nonsensicality of all such hallucinations, particularly when they show a certain apparent plausibility. Its own pet hallucination will take the form of an hypothesis that the progress of knowledge is less a matter of accumulating facts than a matter of destroying "facts." It will assume constantly that the more ignorant a man is the more he knows, positively and indignantly. Among the great leeches and barber-surgeons who profess to medicate the body politic, it will give suffrage to those who admit frankly that all basic diseases are beyond cure, and who consecrate themselves to making the patient as comfortable as possible.
-In the United States there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything–not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of organized public clamor (usually fomented by parties with something to sell) for the erection of an equestrian statue to Susan B. Anthony in front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron Worker’s Union to hold its next convention in the town Symphony Hall–the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes such a proposal–on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never rode a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of the Symphony Hall and knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms–this citizen is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral.
-We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.
The Cult of Hope: Of all the sentimental errors that reign and rage in this incomparable Republic, the worst is that which confuses the function of the critic, whether aesthetic, political or social, with the function of reform. Almost invariably it takes the form of a protest: "The fellow condemns without offering anything better. Why tear down without building up?" So snivel the sweet ones: so wags the national tongue. The messianic delusion becomes a sort of universal murrain. It is impossible to get an audience for an idea that is not "constructive"—i.e., that is not glib, and uplifting, and full of hope, and hence capable of tickling the emotions by leaping the intermediate barrier of intelligence… Unluckily, it is difficult for the American mind to grasp the concept of insolubility… Man is inherently vile—but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness.
*It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
-A mongrel and inferior people, incapable of any spiritual aspiration above that of second-rate English colonials, we seek refuge inevitably in the one sort of superiority that the lower castes of men can authentically boast, to wit, superiority in docility, in credulity, in resignation, in morals. We are the most moral race in the world; there is not another that we do not look down upon in that department; our confessed aim and destiny as a nation is to inoculate them all with our incomparable rectitude. In the last analysis, all ideas are judged among us by moral standards; moral values are our only permanent tests of worth, whether in the arts, in politics, in philosophy or in life itself. Even the instincts of man, so intrinsically immoral, so innocent, are fitted with moral false-faces. That bedevilment by sex ideas which punishes continence, so abhorrent to nature, is converted into a moral frenzy, pathological in the end. The impulse to cavort and kick up one’s legs, so healthy, so universal, is hedged in by incomprehensible taboos; it becomes stealthy, dirty, degrading. The desire to create and linger over beauty, the sign and touchstone of man’s rise above the brute, is held down by doubts and hesitations; when it breaks through it must do so by orgy and explosion, half ludicrous and half pathetic. Our function, we choose to believe, is to teach and inspire the world. We are wrong. Our function is to amuse the world. We are the Bryan, the Henry Ford, the Billy Sunday among the nations...
-The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not believe he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels that he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for his services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him. He may be convinced that a police force, say, is necessary for the protection of his life and property, and that an army and navy safeguard him from being reduced to slavery by some vague foreign kaiser, but even so he views these things as extravagantly expensive–he sees in even the most essential of them an agency for making it easier for the exploiters constituting the government to rob him.
*A Liberal is committed to sure cures that always turn out to be swindles; the Libertarian throws the bottles out of the window, and asks only that the patient be let alone.
-Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst penalty of the man of faith and hope; he is never disappointed, and hence never indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they do not enrage him, or, I may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all the dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically impregnable. Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In the end he may even come to sympathize with god. The old idea of fatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of Him thus? Well, is it any the less disconcerting to think of Him as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?
-A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
-We live in such a time as never was before on land or sea. All the old restraints upon the swinishness of men in the mass are falling away, and the world is gradually coming to be run on the principles borrowed from the communal ethics and politics of wolves and hyennas–nay, of rabbits and polecats.
 

 Love: the delusion that one woman differs from another.
*Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the word, after the age of thirty. He may, at forty, pursue the female of his species with great assiduity, and he may, at fifty, sixty or even seventy, "woo" and marry a more or less fair one in due form of law, but the impulse that moves him in these follies at such ages is never the complex of outlandish illusions and hallucinations that poets describe as love. This complex is quite natural to all males between adolescence and the age of, say, twenty-five, when the kidneys begin to disintegrate. For a youth to reach twenty-one without having fallen in love in an abject and preposterous manner would be for doubts to be raised as to his normalcy. But if he does it after his wisdom teeth are cut, it is no more than a sign that they have been cut in vain—that he is still in his teens, whatever his biological and legal age. Love, so-called, is based upon a view of women that is impossible to any man who has any experience of them. Such a man may, to the end of his life, enjoy the charm of their society, and even respect them and admire them, but, however much he respects and admires them, he nevertheless sees them more or less clearly, and seeing them clearly is fatal to true romance. Find a man of forty-five who heaves and moans over a woman, however amiable and lovely, in the manner of a poet and you will behold either a man who ceased to develop intellectually at twenty-four or thereabout, or a fraud who has his eye on the lands, tenements and hereditaments of the lady’s deceased first husband. Or upon her talents as nurse, or cook, amanuesis and audience. This, no doubt, is what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said that every man over forty is a scoundrel.
-The truth is that, no matter how great the domestic concord and how lavish the sacrifices a man makes for his women-folk, they almost always regard him secretly as a silly and selfish fellow, and cherish the theory that it would be easily possible to improve him. This is because the essential interests of men and women are eternally antithetical. A man may yield over and over again, but in the long run he must occasionally look out for himself—and it is these occasions that his women-folk remember. The typical domestic situation shows a woman trying to induce a man to do something he doesn’t want to do, or to refrain from something that he does want to do. This is true in his bachelor days, when his mother or his sister is his antagonist. It is preëminently true just before his marriage, when the girl who has marked him down is hard at the colossal job of overcoming his reluctance. And after marriage it is so true that there is hardly need to state it. One of the things every man discovers to his disquiet is that his wife, after the first play-acting is over, regards him essentially as his mother used to regard him—that is, as a self-worshiper who needs to be policed and an idiot who needs to be protected. The notion that women admire their men-folks is pure moonshine. The most they ever achieve in that direction is to pity them.

Martyrs
The civilized woman is born half convinced that she is really as weak and heavily put upon as she later pretends to be, and the prevailing folklore offers her endless corroboration. One of the resultant phenomena is the delight in martyrdom that one so often finds in women, and particularly in the least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in suffering; they like to picture themselves as slaughtered saints. Thus they always find something to complain of, and the very conditions of domestic life give them a superabundance of clinical material. If, by any chance, such material shows a falling off, they are uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct is not reasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she will be plunged into utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too bad, but too good. For public opinion among women, remember, does not favor the woman who is full of placid contentment and has no masculine torts to report; if she says that her husband is wholly satisfactory she is looked upon as a numskull even more dense than he is himself. A man, speaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her soothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of his fellows. But when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly atrocities that they describe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the one with the longest and most various repertoire of complaints.

-Once the threshold is crossed emotion comes to the aid of perception. That is to say , the blind, almost irresistible mating impulse, now relieved from the contrary pressure of active disgusts, fortifies itself by manufacturing illusions. The lover sees with an eye that is both opaque and out of focus, and begins the familiar process of editing and improving his girl.
-[Sentimentality] makes [man], above all else, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which, even at its best, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the sale of a mule.
-…a hundred men marry "beneath" them to every woman who perpetrates the same folly.
-Women's dislike of men, like the dislike of Englishmen for Americans, is sharpened by a mingling of envy and contempt. Men's dislike of women, like the dislike of Americans for Englishmen, is diluted by a sneaking suspicion that they are actually superior.
-The really astounding thing about marriage is not that it so often goes smash, but that it so often endures. All the chances run against it, and yet people manage to survive it, and even to like it. The capacity of the human mind for illusion is one of the causes here. Under duress it can very easily convert black into white. It can even convert children into blessings.
-Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and woman out of which rises most of man’s complaint of its absence—to wit, the conflict culminating in marriage, already described—the security of the woman is not something that is in actual being, but something that she is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must be manifest that honour can have no place. An animal fighting for its very existence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul. Even man, for all his boasting about honour, seldom displays it when he has anything of the first value at hazard. He is honourable, perhaps, in gambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him to be honourable in business, for business is bread and butter.
-The other day, having my shoes shined, I was forced to listen to the old song, "Love Me, and the World is Mine!" on the professor's radio. Some day I should like to hear from a man who, having been loved in 1905 or thereabout, is still full of confidence that the world is his.
-Second mariage: the triumph of hope over experience.
*Man's happiness is "I will." Woman's happiness is "He will."
-A gentleman is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.
-No one could deny, I was willing to grant, that in a clearly limited sense, women occupied a place in the world—or, more accurately, aspired to a place in the world—that had some resemblance to that of chattel.
*A woman who is amiable has a more potent weapon in the duel of sex than either beauty or brains.

Romantic Interlude
It is the close of a busy and vexatious day–say half past five or six o’clock of a Winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hands, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed–above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks–of anything, everything , all the things that women talk of: books, music, dress, men, other women. No politics. No business. No theology. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious–but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eyebrow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep–but only for an instant. At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again–slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.
I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The sensation of falling asleep is to me the most delightful in the world. I relish it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I match this situation against any that you can think of. It is not only enchanting; it is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end, when the lady grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been genuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.

Catechism
Q. If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A. Why do men go to zoos?
Others’ Mencken
*There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.
*Life, stripped of its illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eyewink called fame. He founds a family, and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragi-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.
*Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
*Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
*It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
*I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is beter to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
*The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse–that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
*The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing–that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by… dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe–that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
*A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
*A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
*Courtroom – A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
*Generalizations, indeed, all have their limits–even this one. Apply them often enough, and you will come inevitably upon some disconcerting exception.... But because philosophy is long and life is short we must assume, even when we can't entirely believe, that [things] fall into groups and classes, else we could never hope to study them at all.
*Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
*Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
*On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.
*It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
*Even the most clear-headed man can think clearly only for brief stretches. If he does it for half an hour of consecutive time he beats Aristotle. The average citizen of a free democracy does it no more than ten minutes altogether in a lifetime. In brief, we have lost the sureness of instinct of the baboon and not yet perfected sureness of reasoning. It will take a long time to do so–perhaps 100,000 more years.
*Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
*The physical act of reading a book obviously shortens life, for it not only strains the eyes but also tends to compress the lungs and other viscera and to atrophy the disused muscles of leg and arm; but the man of thirty who has read many books is more creditable to his race, all other things being equal, than the man of ninety who has merely lived ninety years.
-For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
-Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
*The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed–and hence clamorous to be led to safety–by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.
-The existence of most human beings is of absolutely no significance to history or to human progress. They live and die as anonymously and as nearly uselessly as so many bullfrogs or houseflies. They are, at best, undifferentiated slaves upon an endless assembly line, and at worse they are robots who leave their mark upon time only by occasionally falling into the machinery, and so incommodint their betters.
-Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
-The satisfaction that a man gets out of conquering–which is to say, succumbing to–a woman of noticeable pulchritude is chiefly the rather banal one of parading her before other men. He likes to show her off as he likes to show his expensive automobile or his big door-knob factory.
-...when I get propaganda [in the mail], and with it there is one of those reply-paid postal cards or envelopes, I always send it back empty... They have to pay three–four cents to get it back, and it's my polite way of saying, "That for you."
-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.
-...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man–that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense–has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
[Censors] are all dirty fellows, and in many of them the sexual obsession is so manifest that it becomes revolting. Old Comstock himself, as everyone knows, kept a collection of filthy pictures in his desk, and vastly enjoyed exhibiting it to like-minded visitors.
-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.
-Every third American devotes himself to improving and uplifting his fellow citizens, usually by force.
Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm.
*Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.
I don't think the boy of lively mind is hurt much by going to college. If he encounters mainly jackasses, then he learns the useful lesson that this is a jackass world.
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.
-Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
Slaves are probably quite as necessary to civilization as men of genius. The human race seems incapable of becoming civilized . Some one must milk the cows–and milking cows and being civilized appear to be as incompatable as drinking highballs and standing on one's head.
...people will believe what they want to believe.
CHURCH. A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will never get there.
CLERGYMAN. A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
CONFIDENCE. The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place.
IDEALIST. One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
...that weighing and choosing faculty which seems to give a man at once his sense of mastery and his feeling of helplessness.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him...
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country, particularly in the field of reform. The trouble with them is not only that they won't and don't work; the trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble.
...the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
-After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits. In no other country known to me is life as safe and agreeable, taking one day with another, as it is in These States. Even in a great Depression few if any starve, and even in a great war the number who suffer by it is vastly surpassed by the number who fatten on it and enjoy it. Thus my view of my country is predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
Nature abhors a moron.
Lawyer - One who protects us from robbers by taking away the temptation.
Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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.
Dachshund - A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.
He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know.
Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.
Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another. 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.
Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
Progress, then, as I see it, is to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge of nature's forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow. Moses believed that the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his family doctor could cure pneumonia, and Columbus believed that devils entered into harmless old women and turned them into witches... You and I, knowing that all three of these distinguished men were wrong in their beliefs, are their superiors to that extent. Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist [1910], p.29-30
If you point out that human progress, as I have defined it, involves the practical enslavement of two-thirds of the human race, my answer is that I can't help it. If you point out that a slave always runs the risk of being oppressed by a particularly cruel master, I answer that a master always runs the risk of having his brains knocked out by a particularly enterprising slave. Ibid., p.32
...an aristocracy must constantly justify its existence. In other words, there must be no artificial conversion of its present strength into perpetual rights. The way must be always open for the admission of strong men from the lower orders, and the way must be always open, too, for the expulsion of men whose strength fails. Ibid., p.73
Well, then, what virtues do I demand in the man who claims enrollment in the highest cast? .... the chief of these qualities is a sort of restless impatience with things as they are - a sort of insatiable desire to help along the evolutionary process.
.... By his life and labors, the human race, or some part of it, makes some measurable progress, however small, upward from the ape. Ibid., pp.113-4
I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him. Ibid., p.116
-Here, then, I arrive at that doctrine of human rights which seems to me to be most in accord with the inflexible and beneficient laws of nature... Of these rights there are two classes - first, those which a man (or a class of men) wrests from his environment by force; and secondly, those which he obtains by an exchange of values. ...he is exercising a right of the second class when he takes his skill and industry into the open market and sells them for whatever they will bring. .... There is, in a word, no irreducible minimum of compensation, due to every man by virtue of his mere existence as a human being. No man has any right to life, save that which he proves by mastering his environment. Ibid., pp.235-6 [III:22]
[25] A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum. [V:2]
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
[30] Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice. Selected from A Little Book in C Major [1916]
Archbishop A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
Church A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will never get there.
Clergyman A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
Conscience The inner voice which warns us that someone is looking.
Confidence The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place.
Creator A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
Evil That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
Experience A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
Fine A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his crime.
Husband A No. 16 neck in a No. 15 1/2 collar.
Idealist One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Immorality The morality of those who are having a better time.
Jealousy The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.
Morality The theory that every human act must either be right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
Pastor One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
Platitude An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone,and (b) that is not true. Psychology The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.
Sunday A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
Sunday School A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. A Book of Burlesques [1916, 1924], 2nd ed., selected from "The Jazz Webster", pp.201-210
[12] Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
[32]* The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
[33] A man may be a fool and not know it - but not if he is married. Ibid., selected from "The Old Subject", pp.213-9.
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. A Book of Prefaces [1917]: "Puritanism As a Literary Force", p.248
What, ladies and gentlemen, in hell or out of it, are we to do with the Ethiop? Who shall answer the thunderous demands of the emerging coon? For emerging he is, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and there will come a morn, believe me or not, when those with ears to hear and hides to feel will discover that he is to be boohed and put off no longer - that he has at last got the power to exact a square answer, and that the days of his docile service as minstrel, torch and goat are done. When that morn dawns, I pray upon both knees, I shall be safe in the Alps, and not below the Potomac River, hurriedly disguised with burnt cork and trying to get out on the high gear. "Si Mutare Potest Aethiops Pellum Suam" in the Smart Set, Sep 17, quoted in Carl R. Dolmetsch's The Smart Set Anthology [1966], p.243
*The black has learned the capital lesson that property is necessary to self-respect, that he will never get anywhere so long as he is poor. Once he is secure in that department he will take up the business of getting back his plain constitutional rights. Ibid., p.246
It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. Damn! A Book of Calumny [1918], quoted in The Great Thoughts
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 discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in 1887... In Defense of Women [1918, rev. 1922], pp.viii-ix
...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. Ibid., p.xi "Human creatures," says ["the Franco-Englishman, W.L."]
-George, borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him. Ibid., p.7
-The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a stock-broker. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements. Ibid., pp.8-9
-What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks...which constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. Ibid., pp.9-10
-Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes... They are the supreme realists of the race. Ibid., p.21
-School days are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
-In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for ``King Lear,'' or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
-After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. -- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
-The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
-The happiest man was the one who came nearest to killing the obvious human desires, hopes and aspirations; the soaring, starving poet.
-A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
-An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

-No-one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.

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

-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.

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.

-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.

-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.

-Progress, then, as I see it, is to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge of nature's forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow. Moses believed that the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his family doctor could cure pneumonia, and Columbus believed that devils entered into harmless old women and turned them into witches... You and I, knowing that all three of these distinguished men were wrong in their beliefs, are their superiors to that extent.

-One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

-I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

-I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
* The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
-Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.
-Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
-Bachelors know more about women than married men do. If they didn't, they'd be married too.
-"He [Huey Pierce Long] was, H.L. Mencken once venemously charged (in a description that echoed the views of many), "simply a backwoods demagogue of the oldest and most familiar model--impudent, blackguardly, and infinitely prehensile.""
*The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
-To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.
*Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
-"All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."
–H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Breathing Space", The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1924 Aug 4. Reprinted in A Carnival of Buncombe.