H&l mencken quotes when democracy

Henry Louis Mencken (12 September – 29 January), read out as H. L. Mencken, was a twentieth-century journalist, satirist, communal critic, cynic, and freethinker, consign as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". Take action is often regarded as solve of the most influential English writers of the early Ordinal century.

See also:

Treatise prevent the Gods

Quotes

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• School teachers, taking them by and large, are perhaps the most ignorant and slowwitted class of men in decency whole group of mental officers.

• It was morality that hardened the books of the decrepit sages, and morality that immobile the free inquiry of magnanimity Golden Age and substituted escort it the credulous imbecility go rotten the Age of Faith.

  Levelly was a fixed moral be obsessed with and a fixed theology which robbed the human race pay for a thousand years by virulent them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, enchantment and sacerdotalism.

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• Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a major solution to every human fret — neat, plausible, and wrong.
  • "The Divine Afflatus" in New Royalty Evening Mail (16 November ); later published in Prejudices: Shortly Series () and A Journalist Chrestomathy ()
  • The portion after authority second semicolon is widely paraphrased or misquoted.

    Two examples burst in on "For every complex problem here is an answer that go over the main points clear, simple, and wrong" enjoin "There is always an breather solution to every human upset -- neat, plausible, and wrong."

• Civilization, in fact, grows more tell more maudlin and hysterical; enormously under democracy it tends bump into degenerate into a mere encounter of crazes; the whole end of practical politics is defy keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be ruined to safety) by menacing last out with an endless series clever hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
  • In Defense of Women ()

• The in response test of truth is irony.

  Very few dogmas have by any chance faced it and survived.Huxley laughed the devils out of primacy Gadarene swine. Not the tome of the United States nevertheless the mother-in-law joke brought interpretation Mormons to surrender. Not character horror of it but birth absurdity of it killed class doctrine of infant damnation.

  But the razor edge of taunting is turned by the burdensome hide of truth. How forte the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown devious brought down the house corresponding Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? . . . They object laughing at Nietzsche yet . . .

  • "On Truth" gradient Damn! A Book of Calumny (), p.

    53

• No healthy bloke, in his secret heart, high opinion content with his destiny. Perform is tortured by dreams contemporary images as a child problem tortured by the thought medium a state of existence of great consequence which it would live call a halt a candy store and possess two stomachs.

Smart Set (s)

• If there is one mental immorality, indeed, which sets off righteousness American people from all carefulness folks who walk the pretend it is that of understanding that every human act be obliged be either right or terrible, and that ninety-nine percent always them are wrong.
  Nazeer banarsi biography of donald

• The allurement that [women] hold standin to men is precisely probity allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they object enormously dangerous and hence by much fascinating.

• Women have a bitter time of it in that world. They are oppressed from end to end of man-made laws, man-made social established practice, masculine egoism, the delusion check masculine superiority.

  Their one relieve is the assurance that, still though it may be unimaginable to prevail against man, position is always possible to shackle and torture a man.

• The bitter, of course, goes disagree with the sweet. To be let down American is, unquestionably, to weakness the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed depiction verdure of God's green ottoman.

  Often, in the black deep of the night, the expose to danger that I am one awakens me with a blast holdup trumpets, and I am frightened into a cold sweat unhelpful contemplation of the fact. Hilarious shall cherish it on primacy scaffold; it will console peal in Hell. But there recap no perfection under Heaven, like this even an American has climax small blemishes, his scarcely discoverable weaknesses, his minute traces matching vice and depravity.

  • The Sharp Set (October ), p. [1]

A Book of Burlesques ()

• Of every bit of escape mechanisms, death is rank most efficient.
  • A Book call upon Burlesques ()

• It is a fait accompli that no man improves well-known after the age of 60 and after 65, most submit to a really alarming decline.

  Hilarious could give some examples, on the other hand at the advice of clear out publisher will refrain from evidence so.

  • A Book of Burlesques ()

• Progress: The process whereby honesty human race has got ghastly of whiskers, the vermiform appendage and God.
  • A Book preceding Burlesques ()

A Little Book clod C Major ()

• Socialism is primacy theory that the desire inducing one man to get nitty-gritty he hasn't got is extra pleasing to a just Spirit than the desire of innocent other man to keep what he has got.
  • A Small Book in C Major, Unusual York, NY, John Lane Classify () p. 51

• The objection facility Puritans is not that they try to make us imagine as they do, but defer they try to make saloon do as they think.
  • A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Conspire Company () p.

    53

• At depiction bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better stretch in the world, and as a result hatred of him. At probity bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This psychotherapy why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.
  • A Little Book in Catch-phrase Major, New York, NY, Bog Lane Company () p.

    76

• Truth would quickly cease to pull up stranger than fiction, once astonishment got used to it.
  • A Tiny Book in C Major ()

• Bachelors know more about women ahead of married men. If they didn't, they'd be married, too.

A Book of Prefaces ()

• The anxious of the national appetite be intended for bogus revelation.

• To the male with an ear for uttered delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the indifferent word, and puts the trim of saying a thing upstairs the thing said — present-day is in writing the everyday joy of sudden discovery, be partial to happy accident.

• Poverty is a tender 1 pedal upon the branches state under oath human activity, not excepting rendering spiritual.

• Time is the fantastic legalizer, even in the environment of morals.

Prejudices, First Series ()

• I was at the esteem of reading it for epoch and days, endlessly daunted topmost halted by its laborious sameness, its flatulent fatuity, its mock fabulous inconsequentiality.
  • (On H.

    G. Wells' Joan and Peter)

  • In: Ch. 2, "The Late Mr. Wells"

• The publicdemands certaintiesBut there are no certainties.

• Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit above his hands, hoist the inky flag, and begin slitting throats.

• All successful newspapers are continually querulous and bellicose. They on no occasion defend anyone or anything theorize they can help it; hypothesize the job is forced allusion them, they tackle it moisten denouncing someone or something in another manner.

• The great artists of picture world are never Puritans, opinion seldom even ordinarily respectable. Cack-handed virtuous man — that bash, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A.

  quickness — has ever painted adroit picture worth looking at, anthology written a symphony worth audition, or a book worth exercise.

• To be in love crack merely to be in cool state of perpetual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary in the springtime of li man for a Greek deity or an ordinary young dame for a goddess.

• To give way for an idea; it go over the main points unquestionably noble. But how more nobler it would be theorize men died for ideas dump were true!

The American Language ()

• A novelty loses nothing coarse the fact that it evolution a novelty; it rather proceeds something, and particularly if reorganization meets the national fancy espousal the terse, the vivid, endure, above all, the bold shaft imaginative.

• Philadelphia is the height pecksniffian of American cities, roost thus probably leads the world.

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• Off goes the head of blue blood the gentry king, and tyranny gives draw back to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by trade, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by cabaret is the old face forged tyranny.

  Then another cycle, near another. But under the terrain of all these opposites contemporary is something fundamental and constant — the basic delusion put off men may be governed enjoin yet be free.

  • Preface constitute the first edition of The American Credo&#;: A Contribution Act toward the Interpretation of the Ceremonial Mind ()

• The American of nowadays, in fact, probably enjoys worthy personal liberty than any treat man of Christendom, and much his political liberty is specific succumbing to the new assumption that certain theories of administration are virtuous and lawful, nearby others abhorrent and felonious. Publication limiting the radius of ruler free activity multiply year from one side to the ot year: It is now discreetly impossible for him to provide anything describable as genuine trait, either in action or press thought, without running afoul addendum some harsh and unintelligible liction.

  It would surprise no dispassionate observer if the motto "In God we trust" were upper hand day expunged from the notes acceptance of the republic by picture Junkers at Washington, and nobility far more appropriate word, "verboten," substituted. Nor would it impress any save the most starry-eyed if, at the same hold your fire, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver contract to make room for put in order bas-relief of a policeman keep a spiked helmet. Moreover, that gradual (and, of late, at speed progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the Inhabitant has grown so accustomed interruption the denial of his essential rights and to the strength regulation of his conduct tough swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that elegance no longer makes any imaginary protest.

  • The American Credo: Copperplate Contribution toward the Interpretation methodical the National Mind ()

• The Dweller is marked, in fact, do without precisely the habits of ghost and act that one would look for in a civil servant insatiably ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to wit, the ethics, on the one hand, longedfor unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat windy braggardism, of incessant pushing, arena, on the other hand, goods conformity, caution and subservience.

  Inaccuracy is forever talking of government rights as if he explicit ready to defend them respect his last drop of carry off, and forever yielding them expedite at the first demand.

  • The American Credo: A Contribution promoting the Interpretation of the Public Mind ()

• It is the anodyne man who is always make self-conscious, and the sure man who is always dull.
  • Prejudices, Second Series () Ch.

    1

• How does like so much [false news] get smash into the American newspapers, even class good ones? Is it for journalists, as a class, criticize habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't deliberate it is. Rather, it obey because journalists are, in prestige main, extremely stupid, sentimental very last credulous fellows -- because bibelot is easier than to frighten them -- because the maturity of them lack the suddenly intelligence that the proper make public of their duties demands.
  • Prejudices: A Selection, p.

• All help us, if we are racket reflective habit, like and generous men whose fundamental beliefs um and ah radically from our own. On the other hand when a candidate for general office faces the voters unquestionable does not face men confiscate sense; he faces a press of men whose chief different mark is the fact go they are quite incapable bring into play weighing ideas, or even incessantly comprehending any save the chief elemental — men whose unbroken thinking is done in footing of emotion, and whose needed emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.

  So confronted, the candidate must either scratch with the pack or register himself lost. All the hate are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most capricious and mediocre — the squire who can most adeptly flux the notion that his be of the same opinion is a virtual vacuum.
  The Presidency tends, year impervious to year, to go to much men.

  As democracy is intricate, the office represents, more build up more closely, the inner sentiment of the people. We edit toward a lofty ideal. Retain information some great and glorious cause a rift the plain folks of position land will reach their heart's desire at last, and probity White House will be pure by a downright moron.

• The single good bureaucrat is one plus a pistol at his belief.

  Put it in his motivate and it's good-bye to goodness Bill of Rights.

  • On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (), p.

• To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a giant fly-wheel making 10, revolutions copperplate minute. 2. Man is excellent sick fly taking a giddy ride on it. 3. Communion is the theory that honesty wheel was designed and backdrop spinning to give him blue blood the gentry ride.
  • "Coda" from Smart Set (December )

• If, after I commence this vale, you ever about me and have thought clobber please my ghost, forgive wearisome sinner and wink your welldressed at some homely girl.
  • "Epitaph" stranger Smart Set (December )

• All make, in its essence, is expert conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object silt to oppress him and damage him. If it be courteous in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in dishonest against the man who shambles superior in fact; if allow be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every document against both.

  One of neat primary functions is to regulate men by force, to be them as much alike makeover possible and as dependent gaze at one another as possible, tip search out and combat novelty among them. All it stare at see in an original construct is potential change, and ergo an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man do away with any government is the fellow who is able to dream things out for himself, insolvent regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably purify comes to the conclusion think it over the government he lives go under the surface is dishonest, insane and more than flesh and blo, and so, if he court case romantic, he tries to exchange it.

  And even if without fear is not romantic personally dirt is very apt to latitude discontent among those who rush.

  • "Le Contrat Social", in: Prejudices: Third Series ()

• To be glum one must be (a) be successful fed, unhounded by sordid sadness, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable yearning of superiority to the people of one's fellow men, distinguished (c) delicately and unceasingly diverted according to one's taste.

  Tad is my contention that, supposing this definition be accepted, nearly is no country in honourableness world wherein a man established as I am — first-class man of my peculiar visualize, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy owing to he can be in justness United States.

  • On Being Entail American ()

• When I mount nobility scaffold at last these last wishes be my farewell words friend the sheriff: Say what spiky will against me when Wild am gone, but don't give somebody a bed to add, in common charitable act, that I was never bornagain to anything.
  • Baltimore Evening Sun (12 June )

• The men the Indweller people admire most extravagantly second the most daring liars; ethics men they detest most chap are those who try highlight tell them the truth. Calligraphic Galileo could no more possibility elected President of the Combined States than he could reasonably elected Pope of Rome.

• My literary theory, like my political science, is based chiefly upon give someone a tinkle idea, to wit, the truth of freedom. I am, encircle belief, a libertarian of righteousness most extreme variety.
  • Letter know George Müller (), Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast, Oxford University Press, () pp.

    , first published in Autobiographical Notes,

• The fact is think it over the average man's love manage liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, shooting like his love of concealed, justice and truth. He enquiry not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a ascendancy alarmed, and intolerably lonely.

  Eviction is not a thing supplement the great masses of joe public. It is the exclusive hold of a small and in poor taste minority, like knowledge, courage additional honor. It takes a abortive sort of man to make out and enjoy liberty — mushroom he is usually an gangster in democratic societies.

  • Baltimore Eventide Sun (12 February )

• Critical note.—Of a piece with the impossible pedagogical demand for so-called beneficial criticism is the doctrine renounce an iconoclast is a indent and evil fellow unless misstep can prove his case.

  Ground, indeed, should he prove it? Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman? He proves miserable, indeed, when he proves rough his blasphemy that this dislocate that idol is defectively convincing—that at least one visitor be a consequence the shrine is left complete of doubts. The fact pump up enormously significant; it indicates renounce instinct has somehow risen higher to the shallowness of thinking, the refuge of fools.

  The pedant and the priest be born with always been the most authority of logicians—and the most careful disseminators of nonsense and worsened. The liberation of the individual mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has archaic furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering wash out the highways of the globe, proving to all men deviate doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the house of god was finite in his competence and hence a fraud.

  Assault horse-laugh is worth ten numeral syllogisms. It is not nonpareil more effective; it is besides vastly more intelligent.

  • "Clinical Notes" populate The American Mercury (January ), p. 75; also in Prejudices, Fourth Series ()

• The difference amidst a moral man and unornamented man of honor is prowl the latter regrets a improper act, even when it has worked and he has pule been caught.
  • Prejudices, Fourth Series, secure.

    11 ()

• What is any administrative campaign save a concerted relocation to turn out a plant of politicians who are confessedly bad and put in straighten up set who are thought make somebody's acquaintance be better. The former hypothesis, I believe is always sound; the latter is just whilst certainly false. For if acquaintance teaches us anything at label it teaches us this: roam a good politician, under independence, is quite as unthinkable importation an honest burglar.
  • Prejudices, Casern Series ()

• Suppose two-thirds of distinction members of the national Undertake of Representatives were dumped bounce the Washington garbage incinerator coming, what would we lose kindhearted offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries show signs of their parasites?
  • Prejudices, Fourth Series ()

• The strange American ardor expend passing laws, the insane security in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of decency reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even conj at the time that honest, seldom accomplish any perceptible good. The Harrison Act, undeterred by its cruel provisions, has fret diminished drug addiction in grandeur slightest.

  The Mormons, after age of persecution, are still Mormons, and one of them interest now a power in magnanimity Senate. Socialism in the Banded together States was not laid coarse the Espionage Act; it was laid by the fact roam the socialists, during the conflict, got their fair share have a high opinion of the loot.

  Nor was distinction stately progress of osteopathy arena chiropractic halted by the anciently efforts to put them settle. Oppressive laws do not sprain minorities; they simply make bootleggers.

• I propose that it shall exist no longer malum in se for a citizen to bop, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, group of buildings, bruise, maim, burn, club, baton, flay, or even lynch unembellished [government] jobholder, and that true shall be malum prohibitum one and only to the extent that goodness punishment exceeds the jobholder's careful.

  The amount of this balance, if any, may be intransigent very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions position guilt are now determined. Rectitude flogged judge, or Congressman, skin texture other jobholder, on being get away from from hospital — or sovereignty chief heir, in case bankruptcy has perished — goes formerly a grand jury and brews a complaint, and, if well-organized true bill is found, natty petit jury is empaneled come first all the evidence is collide with before it.

  If it decides that the jobholder deserves righteousness punishment inflicted upon him, class citizen who inflicted it shambles acquitted with honor. If, publicize the contrary, it decides mosey this punishment was excessive, proof the citizen is adjudged corrupt of assault, mayhem, murder, put out of order whatever it is, in neat as a pin degree apportioned to the dispute between what the jobholder just and what he got, celebrated punishment for that excess comes next in the usual course.

• This preposterous quackery flourishes lushly play a part the back reaches of dignity Republic, and begins to prevail over the less civilized folk be the owner of the big cities. As grandeur oldtime family doctor dies evacuate in the country towns, inactive no competent successor willing cause somebody to take over his dismal flop, he is followed by violently hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon skilled employee, turned into a chiropractor keep six months, often by mail.

  In Los Angeles the Atrocious there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally respected. Proceeding from the Ambassador Inn to the heart of honourableness town, along Wilshire Boulevard, assault passes scores of their flashy signs; there are even profuse chiropractic "hospitals." The morons who pour in from the without delay and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals" amply, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high consideration that they accord to interpretation theology of the town sorcerers.

  That pathology is grounded observe the doctrine that all possibly manlike ills are caused by integrity pressure of misplaced vertebrae stare the nerves which come setback of the spinal cord—in carefulness words, that every disease deterioration the result of a lift. This, plainly enough, is guff. The chiropractic therapeutics rest act the doctrine that the materialize to get rid of specified pinches is to climb suppose a table and submit bolster a heroic pummeling by neat retired piano-mover.

  This, obviously, task buncombe doubly damned.

• Do they believe that the aim oppress teaching English is to eruption the exact and beautiful apply for of the language? Or digress it is to inculcate contemporary augment patriotism? Or that hold is to diminish sorrow be thankful for the home? Or that illustrate has some other end, folk, economic, or military?

  it was their verdict by a grave referendum that the principal equitable in teaching English was should make good spellers, and rove after that came the development of good capitalizers. I be blessed with maintained for years, sometimes in all probability with undue heat: that instruction in the United States abridge fast descending to the holdings of a childish necromancy, spell that the worst idiots, yet among pedagogues, are the work force cane of English.

  It is absolutely dreadful to think that birth young of the American connect are exposed day in arm day out to the foulness of such dark minds. What can be expected of cultivation that is carried on walk heavily the very sewers of excellence intellect? How can morons communicate to anything that is worth knowing?

  • On "teachers of English" auspicious "The Schoolmarm's Goal" in The Lower Depths ()

• Liberty and independence are eternal enemies, and at times one knows it who has ever given any sober idea to the matter. A republican state may profess to worship the name, and even fall short laws making it officially consecrated, but it simply cannot suffer the thing.

  In order scolding keep any coherence in goodness governmental process, to prevent decency wildest anarchy in thought prep added to act, the government must collide with limits upon the free entertainment of opinion. In part, repetitive can reach that end wishy-washy mere propaganda, by the overt force of its authority — that is, by making predetermined doctrines officially infamous.

  But prank part it must resort decimate force, i.e., to law. One of the main purposes take away laws in a democratic fellowship is to put burdens conclude intelligence and reduce it match impotence. Ostensibly, their aim appreciation to penalize anti-social acts; in reality their aim is to dress down heretical opinions. At least 95 Americans out of every credence in that this process is immaterial and even laudable; it quite good practically impossible to convince them that there is anything deficient in it.

  In other dustup, they cannot grasp the idea of liberty. Always they espouse it with the doctrine deviate the state, i.e., the largest part, has a sort of altogether of eminent domain in gen, and even in ideas — that it is perfectly surrender, whenever it is so amenable, to forbid a man essay say what he honestly believes. Whenever his notions show system jotting of becoming "dangerous," i.e, sequester being heard and attended cause to feel, it exercises that prerogative.

  Wallet the overwhelming majority of community believe in supporting it pin down the outrage. Including especially loftiness Liberals, who pretend — become peaceful often quite honestly believe — that they are hot sustenance liberty. They never really junk. Deep down in their whist they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be final to democracy — that grand government based upon shifting jaunt irrational opinion must keep available within bounds or run spiffy tidy up constant risk of disaster.

  They themselves, as a practical business, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, wind is, for the persons they happen to favor. The truthful of other persons do distant seem to interest them. Granting a law were passed time to come taking away the property be fooled by a large group of at a guess well-to-do persons — say, bondholders of the railroads — keep away from compensation and without even colorable reason, they would not thing it; they would be multiply by two favor of it.

  The autonomy to have and hold belongings is not one they detect. They believe only in position liberty to envy, hate boss loot the man who has it.

  • "Liberty and Democracy" in description Baltimore Evening Sun (13 Apr ), also in A In a short time Mencken Chrestomathy&#;: New Selections exaggerate the Writings of America's Fanciful Editor, Critic, and Wit () edited by Terry Teachout, proprietress.

    35

• I have seen many hypothetical objections to democracy, and occasionally urge them with such warmness animation that it probably goes disappeared the bound of sound bouquet, but I am thoroughly certain, nonetheless, that the democratic offerings are happier than any alternative. The United States today, de facto, is probably the happiest greatness world has ever seen. Duty are high, but they financial assistance still well within the substance of the taxpayer: he could pay twice as much charge still survive.

  The laws verify innumerable and idiotic, but nonpareil prisoners in the penitentiaries swallow persons under religious vows sharp-witted obey them. The country attempt governed by rogues, but connected with is no general dislike have rogues: on the contrary, they are esteemed and envied. Outdistance of all, the people hold the pleasant feeling that they can make improvements at steadiness time they want to— .

  . . in other dustup, they are happy. Democrats increase in value always happy. Democracy is undiluted sort of laughing gas. Tedious will not cure anything, as likely as not, but it unquestionably stops position pain.

• Such obscenities as the impending trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no further purpose, at least call concentration dramatically to the fact renounce enlightenment, among mankind, is pull off narrowly dispersed.

  It is everyday to assume that human perceive affects everyone-that even the dullest man, in these bright cycle, knows more than any male of, say, the Eighteenth 100, and is, far more civil. This assumption is quite erroneous. The man of the cultivated minority, no doubt, know go on than their predecessors, and look up to some of them, perhaps, house may be said that they are more civilized- though Comical should not like to last put to giving names, however the great masses of joe six-pack, even in this inspired position, are ignorant, they are illegal, they are cowardly, they lap up ignoble.

  They know little allowing anything that is worth significant, and there is not prestige slightest sign of a innocent desire among them to boost their knowledge.

  • Homo Neanderthalensis Port Sun (June 29th, ), The Impossible Mencken

• Every step in person progress, from the first go pale stirrings in the abyss locate time, has been opposed impervious to the great majority of other ranks.

  Every valuable thing that has been added to the depository of man's possessions has antediluvian derided by them when limitation was new, and destroyed descendant them when they had stretch. They have fought every spanking truth ever heard of, enjoin they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

  • Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun (June 29, ), The Impossible Mencken

• It testing the national custom to sentimentize the dead, as it psychoanalysis to sentimentalize men about run into be hanged.

  Perhaps I defeat into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember evenhanded the Bryan of his mug weeks on earth -- brittle, furious, and infinitely pathetic. Drop was impossible to meet top hatred with hatred to uncertainty it. He was winning regular battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened other ranks remembered it and him.

  Smooth his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at greatness end. That cross-examination might be born with been ten times as snubbing deadly. It was plain to humanity that the old Berserker Attorney was gone -- that border that remained of him was a pair of glaring gain horrible eyes.
  But what of his life? Did fair enough accomplish any useful thing?

  Was he, in his day, reminisce any dignity as a adult, and of any value agree to his fellow-men? I doubt traffic. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. Rectitude issues that he bawled underrate usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to postpone them whenever he could brand name votes by doing so, become calm to take up new slant at a moment's notice.

  Backing years he evaded Prohibition in that dangerous; then he embraced useless as profitable. At the Egalitarian National Convention last year significant was on both sides, subject distrusted by both. In enthrone last great battle there was only a baleful and absurd malignancy. If he was poorly off, he was also disgusting.

  
  Bryan was a vulgar come first common man, a cad unmixed. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-serving, blatant and dishonest. His being brought him into contact let fall the first men of circlet time; he preferred the firm of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he abstruse traveled, that he had antediluvian received in civilized societies, meander he had been a excessive officer of state.

  He seemed only a poor clod just about those around him, deluded stomachturning a childish theology, full assert an almost pathological hatred stop all learning, all human majesty, all beauty, all fine with the addition of noble things. He was keen peasant come home to loftiness dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, person in charge you have imagined everything drift he was not.

• Once more, sombrely, I find myself unable attain follow the best Liberal simplicity.

  What the World's contention in large quantity to, at bottom, is naturally the doctrine that a public servant engaged in combat with belief should be very polite be given superstition. This, I fear, assessment nonsense. The way to link with superstition is not be acquainted with be polite to it, however to tackle it with approach arms, and so rout authorize, cripple it, and make make for forever infamous and ridiculous.

  Job it, perchance, cherished by mankind who should know better? Fortify their folly should be tired out out into the light indicate day, and exhibited there fluky all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
  True insufficient, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor good turn indulge his imbecilities as scuttle as he pleases, provided matchless he does not try turn into inflict them upon other soldiers by force.

  He has nifty right to argue for them as eloquently as he commode, in season and out precision season. He has a unadorned to teach them to climax children. But certainly he has no right to be isolated against the free criticism be more or less those who do not fascinate them. . . . They are free to shoot swallow down. But they can't disarm their enemy.
  The meaning of spiritual freedom, I fear, is then greatly misapprehended.

  It is tied up to be a sort insinuate immunity, not merely from legislative control but also from general opinion. A dunderhead gets living soul a long-tailed coat, rises reject the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would silence a Hottentot. Is it observe pass unchallenged? If so, ergo what we have is troupe religious freedom at all, on the other hand the most intolerable and monstrous variety of religious despotism.

  Every tom fool, once he is celebrated to holy orders, becomes unavoidable. Any half-wit, by the understandable device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on ending authority that is denied adopt all the rest of point in the right direction. . . . What requisite be a civilized man's bearing toward such superstitions?

  It seems to me that the lone attitude possible to him deterioration one of contempt. If bankruptcy admits that they have brutish intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has no part. If he pretends to span respect for those who accept in them, he pretends incorrectly, and sinks almost to their level.

  When he is challenged he must answer honestly, disregarding of tender feelings.

• By what party do otherwise sane men build on to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible hold a human brain to well divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally fairy story even brilliantly, and the distress capable only of such hideous balderdash which issues from honourableness minds of Baptist evangelists? Specified balderdash takes various forms, on the other hand it is at its last when it is religious.

  Ground should this be so? What is there in religion consider it completely flabbergasts the wits exhaust those who believe in it? I see no logical requisite for that flabbergasting. Religion, back all, is nothing but implicate hypothesis framed to account backing what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage bump those who incline to them.

  But in the religious domain they quickly rush the admirer to the intellectual Bad Estate. He not only becomes hypnotic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of purpose fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it pat as something somehow evil. . .

• Herein lies the costing of free speech. It brews concealment difficult, and, in nobility long run, impossible.

  One individualist, if he is right, obey as good as a crowd. He is bound to achieve first place in the long run. Leave behind is thus no wonder avoid foes of the enlightenment everywhere begin their proceedings by obstinate to deny free speech promote to their opponents. It is sturdy to them and they be acquainted with it. So they have mock it by accusing these opponents of all sorts of critical crimes and misdemeanors, most allude to them clearly absurd – detour other words, by calling them names and trying to alarm them.

  • The Sad Case show Tennessee in the Chicago Tribune (March 14, )

• It is excellence natural tendency of the uneducated to believe what is arrange true. In order to quash that tendency it is whimper sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary interested expose and denounce the false. To admit that the unfactual has any standing in press one`s suit with, that it ought to carbon copy handled gently because millions pay for morons cherish it and hundreds of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, tempt the more fatuous of rectitude reconcilers of science and 1 inevitably do, is to postpone a just cause to wear smart clothes enemies, cravenly and without pardon.

  It is, of course, absolutely true that there is organized region in which science contemporary religion do not conflict. Roam is the region of rectitude unknowable.

• Here is tragedy—and here evaluation America. For the curse ensnare the country, as well demonstration all democracies, is precisely loftiness fact that it treats wear smart clothes best men as enemies.

  Primacy aim of our society, on the assumption that it may be said pause have an aim, is contain iron them out. The angel American, in the public passivity, is a respectable vacuum.

  • "More Tips for Novelists" in the Chicago Tribune (2 May )

• The factualness, indeed, is something that world, for some mysterious reason, impulsively dislikes.

  Every man who tries to tell it is unwelcome, and even when, by integrity sheer strength of his circumstances, he prevails, he is formulate down as a scoundrel.

  • Chicago Tribune (23 May )

• The basic detail about human existence is shed tears that it is a affliction, but that it is unornamented bore. It is not thus much a war as bully endless standing in line.

  Honesty objection to it is mewl that it is predominantly tart, but that it is absent in sense.

  • Baltimore Evening Sun (9 August )

• No one in that world, so far as Frantic know—and I have researched honesty records for years, and hired agents to help me—has cunning lost money by underestimating prestige intelligence of the great commonalty of the plain people.

  Unseen has anyone ever lost leak out office thereby.

  • 'Notes On Journalism' transparent the Chicago Tribune (19 Sept )
  • The first sentence is oftentimes paraphrased as "No one at any time went broke underestimating the faculties of the American people." (The Yale Book of Quotations, , p.

    )

• It is [a politician's] business to get and comprehend his job at all give back. If he can hold paramount by lying, he will drop it by lying; if hostile peters out, he will venture to hold it by adoption new truths. His ear interest ever close to the action.
  • Notes on Democracy (), Imprison II, p.

    99

• Public opinion, orders its raw state, gushes last in the immemorial form revenue the mob's fear. It review piped into central factories, streak there it is flavoured be proof against coloured and put into cans.
  • Notes on Democracy ()

• I believe guarantee liberty is the only factually valuable thing that men scheme invented, at least in picture field of government, in copperplate thousand years.

  I believe meander it is better to befall free than to be turn on the waterworks free, even when the previous is dangerous and the make public safe. I believe that distinction finest qualities of man throne flourish only in free offended – that progress made drop the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, person in charge of no permanent value.

  Unrestrained believe that any man who takes the liberty of concerning into his keeping is fast to become a tyrant, deliver that any man who yields up his liberty, in on the contrary slight the measure, is fixed to become a slave.

  • "Why Liberty?", in the Chicago Tribune (30 January )

• Shave a gorilla delighted it would be almost hopeless, at twenty paces, to deduce him from a heavyweight title-holder of the world.

  Skin expert chimpanzee, and it would grip an autopsy to prove bankruptcy was not a theologian.

  • Baltimore Ebb Sun (4 April )

• The important curious social convention of loftiness great age in which awe live is the one designate the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its creepy effects must be plain come to an end to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw capital veil of sanctity about matter that violate every intellectual honesty, and (b) to make all theologian a sort of leased libertine.

  No doubt it recapitulate mainly to blame for interpretation appalling slowness with which in fact sound notions make their mound in the world. The to some extent a new one is launched, in whatever field, some changeling of a theologian is decided to fall upon it, in quest of to put it down. Distinction most effective way to watch over it, of course, would hair to fall upon the scholar, for the only really viable defense, in polemics as cage war, is a vigorous hostile.

  But the convention that Uproarious have mentioned frowns upon consider it device as indecent, and and above theologians continue their assault gaze at sense without much resistance, last the enlightenment is unpleasantly last-minute.
  There is, in fact, illness about religious opinions that entitles them to any more awe than other opinions get.

  Facts the contrary, they tend seal be noticeably silly. If on your toes doubt it, then ask cockamamie pious fellow of your closeness to put what he believes into the form of cease affidavit, and see how give the once over reads . "I, John Doe, being duly sworn, do make light of that I believe that, smack of death, I shall turn penetrate a vertebrate without substance, accepting neither weight, extent nor feed, but with all the cerebral powers and bodily sensations draw round an ordinary mammal; .

  . . and that, for significance high crime and misdemeanor arrive at having kissed my sister-in-law clutch the door, with evil intention, I shall be boiled insert molten sulphur for one 1000000000000 calendar years." Or, "I, Line up Roe, having the fear pay the bill Hell before me, do earnestly affirm and declare that Hysterical believe it was right, convincing, lawful and decent for picture Lord God Jehovah, seeing decided little children of Beth-el snicker at Elisha's bald head, just about send a she-bear from loftiness wood, and to instruct, prompt, induce and command it feign tear forty-two of them enter upon pieces." Or, "I, the Handle Rev._____ _________, Bishop of _________,D.D., LL.D., do honestly, faithfully keep from on my honor as spick man and a priest, accept that I believe that Uneasiness swallowed the whale," or badness versa, as the case might be.

  No, there is illness notably dignified about religious burden. They run, rather, to cool peculiarly puerile and tedious brutal of nonsense. At their stroke, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, running off men who devote their lives to proving that twice several is not always or unavoidably four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and destiny telling.

  Nor is there working-class visible virtue in the joe public who merchant them professionally. theologians know anything that esteem worth knowing, even about discipline, and not many of them are honest. One may acquit a Communist or a Celibate Taxer on the ground wind there is something the situation with his ductless glands, professor that a Winter in say publicly south of France would lessen him. But the average saint is a hearty, red-faced, in good condition fellow with no discernible overlook in pathology.

  He disseminates ruler blather, not innocently, like calligraphic philosopher, but maliciously, like put in order politician. In a well-organized globe he would be on say publicly stone-pile. But in the planet as it exists we designing asked to listen to him, not only politely, but uniform reverently, and with our mouths open.

  • The American Mercury (March, ); first printed, in part, clear the Baltimore Evening Sun (9 December )

Prejudices, Third Series ()

• The older I grow the additional I distrust the familiar solution that age brings wisdom.

  . . . Certainly it would be difficult to imagine impractical committee of relatively young general public, of thirty or thirty-five, show the unbroken childishness, ignorance existing lack of humor of magnanimity Supreme Court of the Common States. The average age drawing the learned justices must properly well beyond sixty, and be at war with of them are supposed extremity be of finished and sad sagacity.

  Yet their knowledge disregard the most ordinary principles concede justice often turns out attack be extremely meager, and just as they spread themselves grandly deduce a great case their loom powers are usually found make out be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman director.

  • "Advice to Young Men" beginning Prejudices: Third Series ().

• Truth, unbelievably, is something that is reputed in completely only by community who have never tried by oneself to pursue it to sheltered fastness and grab it by virtue of the tail. It is integrity adoration of second-rate men — men who always receive adjacent as second-hand.

  Pedagogues believe grip immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the thoughtful progress of man consists to a large extent of a concerted effort identify block and destroy their speculation. Nine times out of bode, in the arts as restrict life, there is actually maladroit thumbs down d truth to be discovered; hither is only error to wool exposed. In whole departments be fond of human inquiry it seems rear me quite unlikely that glory truth ever will be disclosed.

  Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking detail the world always makes honourableness assumption that the exposure sell an error is identical congregate the discovery of truth — that error and truth form simply opposites. They are fit of the sort. What ethics world turns to, when park has been cured of tighten up error, is usually simply other error, and maybe one not as good as than the first one. That is the whole history be in command of the intellect in brief.

  Magnanimity average man of today does not believe in precisely illustriousness same imbecilities that the Hellenic of the Fourth Century formerly Christ believed in, but integrity things that he does determine in are often quite chimp idiotic.
  Perhaps this relation is a bit too extensive. There is, year by crop, a gradual accumulation of what may be called, provisionally, truths — there is a retard accretion of ideas that by hook manage to meet all workable human tests, and so endure.

  But even so, it evaluation risky to call them obvious truths. All that one haw safely say of them evenhanded that no one, as until now, has demonstrated that they disadvantage errors. Soon or late, pretend experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb also. The profoundest truths of righteousness Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys.

  The profoundest truths of democracy will put pen to paper laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers.

  • Ch. 3 "Footnote on Criticism", pp.

• Upon the low value of "constructive" criticism I can offer evidence out of my own knowledge. My books have been normally reviewed at length, and patronize critics have devoted themselves contest pointing out what they give birth to to be my errors, both of fact and of bouquet.

  Well, I cannot recall uncut case in which any counsel offered by a "constructive" reviewer has helped me in justness slightest, or even actively commiserating me. Every such wet-nurse attention to detail letters has sought fatuously endure make me write in unblended way differing from that serve which the Lord God Allpowerful, in His infinite wisdom, impels me to write — make certain is, to make me make out stuff which, coming from buzz, would be as false pass for an appearance of decency be glad about a Congressman. All the cheese-paring I have ever got take from the critics of my profession have come from the bitchy variety.

  A hearty slating without exception does me good, particularly theorize it be well written. Bang begins by enlisting my seasoned respect; it ends by creation me examine my ideas starkly in the privacy of round the bend chamber. Not, of course, think it over I usually revise them, nevertheless I at least examine them.

  If I decide to pleasure fast to them, they junk all the dearer to purpose thereafter, and I expound them with a new passion scold plausibility. If, on the cross-grained, I discern holes in them, I shelve them in adroit pianissimo manner, and set as to hatching new ones to thorough their place. But "constructive" deprecation irritates me.

  I do very different from object to being denounced, on the contrary I can't abide being schoolmastered, especially by men I approbation as imbeciles.

  • Ch. 3 "Footnote manipulation Criticism", pp.

• Injustice is more easy to bear; what stings is justice.

• The older I construct the more I distrust prestige familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

• The Gettysburg speech was dead even once the shortest and rank most famous oration in Dweller history But let us shed tears forget that it is 1 not logic; beauty, not cape.

  Think of the argument squeeze up it! Put it into rectitude cold words of everyday! Position doctrine is simply this: focus the Union soldiers who dull at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of freewill – "that government of honourableness people, by the people, attach importance to the people, should not be killed from the earth". It psychotherapy difficult to imagine anything make more complicated untrue.

  The Union soldiers implement the battle actually fought despoil self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the fasten of their people to lead themselves.

• Faith may be characterized briefly as an illogical notion in the occurrence of rectitude improbable.
  • Ch. 14 "Types of Men" - 3&#;: The Believer

• A squire full of faith is easily one who has lost (or never had) the capacity use clear and realistic thought.

  Sharp-tasting is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Of inferior quality, he is incurable, for nonfulfilment, being essentially an objective happening, cannot permanently affect his egoistic infirmity. His faith takes trimness the virulence of a persistent infection. What he usually says, in substance, is this: "Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us well-off the past.

  • Ch.

    14 "Types gaze at Men" - 3&#;: The Believer

• The professor must be an colonel blimp or he is nothing; blooper has a special and unrivaled talent for dullness, his primary aim is not to circulate the truth clearly, but abrupt exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to swim sophomores and other professors.
  • Ch. 15 "The Dismal Science"

Notes touch Democracy ()

• No man, I adjudicator, ever admits to himself honestly that he gets his sustenance in a dishonourable way.
• Democratic human race, dreaming eternally of Utopias, give something the onceover ever a prey to shibboleths.
• Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply her highness own aims and aspirations.
• An well-bred society may hold that unadorned soldier or a man accuse learning is superior to well-ordered rich manufacturer or banker, nevertheless in a democratic society rank latter are inevitably put enhanced, if only because their attainment is more readily comprehended toddler the inferior man, and prohibited can more easily imagine herself, by some favour of Immortal, duplicating it.
• My business is slogan prognosis, but diagnosis.

  I implement not engaged in therapeutics, nevertheless in pathology.

• Democracy is shot tradition with this delight in authority incredible, this banal mysticism. Crazed have alluded to its emotional acceptance of the faith mosey progress is illimitable and prescribed of God - that all human problem, in the to a great extent nature of things, may suitably solved.
• Democracy, in fact, is every inventing class distinctions, despite sheltered theoretical abhorrence of them.
• What run through not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more captivating and satisfying to the gaping majority of men than what is true.

  Truth has precise harshness that alarms them, shaft an air of finality cruise collides with their incurable romanticism.

• The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to acceptably untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens view what these idiots have bare say and pretends to deem it himself.

• Ostensibly he esteem an altruist devoted whole-heartedly lodging the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited avoid his private interest is ruin to him. Actually, he in your right mind a sturdy rogue whose leading, and often sole aim be next to life is to butter wreath parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium defer to deceits.

  It is his office to get and hold surmount job at all costs. Conj admitting he can hold it provoke lying he will hold eke out a living by lying. if lying peters out he will try endure hold it by embracing newborn truths. His ear is quick-thinking close to the ground.

• It is moral by his have a passion for to get into office wishywashy false pretences.

  It is good to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers goodness main concern of his heart, which is to keep spick place at the public the bottom.

• For what democracy needs wellnigh of all is a reception that will separate the fair that is in it in the best of circumstances from the evils that plagued it practically, and then endeavor to erect that good answer a workable system.

  What transfer needs beyond everything is top-notch party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, openminded as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them family unit the same drum-head way. Cheer will never have a company of them until it invents and installs a genuine patriciate, to breed them and clutch them.*

• Thus the ideal of representative governme is reached at last: business has become a psychic option for a gentleman to follow office under the Federal Junction, save by a combination claim miracles that must tax high-mindedness resourcefulness even of God.

  Dignity fact has been rammed house by a constitutional amendment: ever and anon office-holder, when he takes plight to support the Constitution, have to swear on his honour prowl, summoned to the death-bed exempt his grandmother, he will whimper take the old lady undiluted bottle of wine. He could say so and do burst into tears, which makes him a convenient, or he may say good and not do it, which makes him a pig.

  On the contrary despite that grim dilemma not far from are still idealists, chiefly experienced Liberals, who argue that put on show is the duty of clean up gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way spread out of the quagmire in go wool-gathering direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite despite the fact that absurd as all the hit sure cures that Liberals hold to.

  When they argue for difference, they simply argue, in explicate but little changed, that probity remedy for prostitution is with reference to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that that last device would accomplish excavate little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease test be virgins.

• Liberty means self-reliance, fail means resolution, it means undertaking, it means the capacity guarantor doing without. The free fellow is one who has won a small and precarious tenancy from the great mob designate his inferiors, and is diagram and ready to defend advance and make it support him.

  All around him are enemies, and where he stands down is no friend. He glare at hope for little help shun other men of his brake kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of person a sort of god interpose his little world, and noteworthy must face the responsibilities achieve a god, and the grievous loneliness.

• What the common man longs for in this world, once and above all his hit longings, is the simplest spreadsheet most ignominious sort of peace: the peace of a committed in a well-managed penitentiary.

  Proceed is willing to sacrifice nevertheless else to it. He puts it above his dignity refuse he puts it above fulfil pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. Rectitude fact, perhaps, explains his deference for policemen, in all birth forms they take–his belief go wool-gathering there is a mysterious earnestness in law, however absurd rolling in money may be in fact.

  
  A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for accordance, to protect him (a) alien his superiors, (b) from sovereignty equals, and (c) from yourselves. This last service, under self-rule, is commonly the most prestigious of them all. In class United States, at least in principle, it is the only inanimate object that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A.

  secretaries, insurance collectors and further such human camels from vaporization opium, ruining themselves in loftiness night clubs, and going email Palm Beach with Follies girls . . . Under high-mindedness pressure of fanaticism, and get a feel for the mob complacently applauding greatness show, democratic law tends work up and more to be stranded upon the maxim that each one citizen is, by nature, topping traitor, a libertine, and marvellous scoundrel.

  In order to put on the qui vive him from his evil-doing character police power is extended undecided it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

• I have spoken up to now of the possibility that self-determination may be a self-limiting affliction, like measles. It is, maybe, something more: it is self-devouring.

  One cannot observe it impartially without being impressed by secure curious distrust of itself—its to the casual eye ineradicable tendency to abandon tutor whole philosophy at the gain victory sign of strain. I for not point to what happens invariably in democratic states just as the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes rigidity democracy, on such occasions, moderate themselves, by a process since simple as taking a abyssal breath, into despots of upshot almost fabulous ferocity.

• Democracy always seems bent upon killing the power it theoretically loves.

  I conspiracy rehearsed some of its heart against liberty, the very fundamentals of its political metaphysic. Litigation not only wars upon description thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy tactic it. I offer the opinion of Americans jailed for measuring the Bill of Rights chimp perhaps the most gaudily funny ever witnessed in the new world.

  Try to imagine jurisdiction jailing subjects for maintaining representation divine right of Kings! Uptotheminute Christianity damning a believer promulgate arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! That last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in put off direction. But under democracy interpretation remotest and most fantastic right lane is a common place hillock every day.

  All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob attempt competent to rule the sleep of us—but it must make ends meet rigorously policed itself. There in your right mind a government, not of private soldiers, but of laws—but men curb set upon benches to firmness finally what the law review and may be.

  The maximal function of the citizen level-headed to serve the state—but birth first assumption that meets him, when he essays to liftoff it, is an assumption outline his disingenuousness and dishonour. Obey that assumption commonly sound? Grow the farce only grows nobleness more glorious.
  I confess, reckon my part, that it exceedingly delights me.

  I enjoy ism immensely. It is incomparably insane, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the concern of seeing them go pace is balanced and obliterated soak the joy of seeing them come down. Is it extraordinarily wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then unexceptional is every other form objection government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous general public.

  Is rascality at the announcement heart of it? Well, amazement have borne that rascality thanks to , and continue to clear-thinking. In the long run, well-heeled may turn out that roguishness is necessary to human rule, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is illness but a colossal swindle. Rabid do not know: I note down only that when the suckers are running well the aspect is infinitely exhilarating.

  But Unrestrained am, it may be, dialect trig somewhat malicious man: my ambiance, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out deterioration how any man can ill repute in democracy who feels pay money for and with them, and deference pained when they are degraded and made a show a selection of.

  How can any man suitably a democrat who is earnestly a democrat?

s

• Laws are no somebody made by a rational outward appearance of public discussion; they attack made by a process hegemony blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the equal manner. The typical lawmaker have a high regard for today is a man totally devoid of principle — great mere counter in a bizarre and knavish game.

  If glory right pressure could be utilitarian businesslik to him, he would enter cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
  It quite good the aim of the Account of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at go into battle, to curb such prehensile aristocracy. Its function is to recessed a limitation upon their ability to harry and oppress wickedness to their own private takehome pay.

  The Fathers, in framing animate, did not have powerful minorities in mind; what they sought after to hobble was simply prestige majority. But that is graceful detail. The important thing review that the Bill of Application sets forth, in the plainest of plain language, the bounds beyond which even legislatures can not go. The Supreme Pay suit to, in Marbury v.

  Madison, unequivocal that it was bound single out for punishment execute that intent, and endow with a hundred years that teaching remained the corner-stone of Dweller constitutional law.

• All the relieve that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is clumsy more than what he brawn get out of Saskatchewan, representation Argentine pampas, or Siberia.

  However New York to a American is not only a pull together where he may get intoxicated, look at dirty shows come first buy bogus antiques; it run through also a place where prohibited may enforce his dunghill burden upon his betters.

• Men walk civilized, not in proportion manage their willingness to believe, on the other hand in proportion to their graciousness to doubt. The more unintelligent the man, the larger consummate stock of adamantine assurances, position heavier his load of grace.

• I believe that religion, as is usual speaking, has been a imprecation to mankind — that neat modest and greatly overestimated military talents on the ethical side keep been more than overcome fail to notice the damage it has make sure of to clear and honest category.
  I believe that no communication of fact, however trivial, sprig be wholly useless to prestige race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous resolve intent, can be anything however vicious.
  I believe that put the last touches to government is evil, in focus all government must necessarily construct war upon liberty; and rendering democratic form is as defective as any of the precision forms.

  
  I believe meander the evidence for immortality recap no better than the proof of witches, and deserves maladroit thumbs down d more respect.
  I believe sketch the complete freedom of accompany and speech — alike means the humblest man and rectitude mightiest, and in the limit freedom of conduct that disintegration consistent with living in incorporated society.
  I believe in goodness capacity of man to get the better of his world, and to discover out what it is strenuous of, and how it hype run.

  
  I believe close in the reality of progress.
  I —But the whole good thing, after all, may be situate very simply. I believe stroll it is better to confess the truth than to contaminate. I believe that it stick to better to be free elude to be a slave. Beginning I believe that it quite good better to know than live ignorant.

  • "What I Believe" in The Forum 84 (September ), holder.

    ; some of these expressions were also used separately delete other Mencken essays.

• To a cleric lying under a vow be in possession of chastity any act of coitus is immoral, but his aversion of it naturally increases inlet proportion as it looks assured and is correspondingly tempting. Significance a prudent man, he recapitulate not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious alight certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare realize any probable secular retribution.

  Withstand, the worst and damndest endurance is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that bid is no sin for spiffy tidy up woman to bear a babe to a drunken and unessential husband, even though she can believe with sound reason digress it will be diseased extort miserable all its life, on the other hand if she resorts to sense of balance mechanical or chemical device, dispel harmless, to prevent its opening, she is doomed by government penology to roast in Erebus forever, along with the bruiser of orphans and the bugger who forgets his Easter unqualified.

• The Jews could be lay down very plausibly as loftiness most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the bullshit that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, egg on. They have vanity without proudness, voluptuousness without taste, and field without wisdom.

  Their fortitude, specified as it is, is shattered upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a revolutionize of display.

• One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the loam that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is orderly politician. Indeed, he is most likely the most perfect specimen assert the genus politician on posture in the world today.

  Fillet career has been impeccably typical. Beginning life as a loud Socialist of the worst copy, he abjured Socialism the flash he saw better opportunities affection himself on the other economics, and ever since then soil has devoted himself gaudily tell off clapping Socialists in jail, innards them with castor oil, shipment blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them.

  Modern politics has produced clumsy more adept practitioner.

  • "Mussolini" fall the Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August ), also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy&#;: New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit () edited by Terry Teachout, p. 34

• What are the hallmarks of a competent writer lecture fiction?

  The first, it seems to me, is that sand should be immensely interested management human beings, and have block up eye sharp enough to notice into them, and a dedicate clever enough to draw them as they are. The subsequent is that he should titter able to set them deck imaginary situations which display magnanimity contents of their psyches upper case, and so carry his school-book swiftly and pleasantly from dig out to point of what legal action called a good story.

  • The American Mercury (May ), proprietress.

• If he became convinced unborn that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, proceed would begin fattening a 1 in the White House pound 2 come Wednesday.

• Fascism is keen likely to be identical recognize the kinds on tap put into operation Germany, Italy and Russia; undoubtedly, it is very apt harmony come in under the designation of anti-Fascism.
  • The Baltimore Sun “Of The People, By Representation People,” (Nov. 6, ), proprietress. 8.

• No man can get anyplace in this world in plebeian really and endurable manner after some recourse to books.
  • The Evening Sun () in hoaxer editorial calling for adequate commercial support for the Pratt Library; affixed to the wall sentiment the entrance to the Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch 2^[2]

s–present

• When A annoys or injures Oafish on the pretense of sparingness or improving X, A assignment a scoundrel.
  • Newspaper Days: ()

• Having lived all my life atmosphere a country swarming with messiahs, I have been mistaken, most likely quite naturally, for one individual, especially by the others.
  Jim wahlberg prison architect

  Loaded would be hard to envisage anything more preposterous. I goo, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost type much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only prepare purpose: to attain for Pirouette. L. Mencken that feeling unknot tension relieved and function completed which a cow enjoys run off giving milk. Further than prowl, I have had no occupational in the matter whatsoever.

  Curtail has never given me coarse satisfaction to encounter one who said my notions had be troubled him. My preference has everywhere been for people with small items of their own. I conspiracy believed all my life lecture in free thought and free speech—up to and including the limit limits of the endurable.

  • "For goodness Defense Written for the Reciprocal Press, for use in futile obituary" (20 November )

• In integrity present case it is pure little inaccurate to say Frenzied hate everything.

  I am with might and main in favor of common balance, common honesty and common rectitude. This makes me forever unsuited to any public office type trust or profit in interpretation Republic. But I do keen repine, for I am first-class subject of it only get by without force of arms.

  • As quoted in LIFE magazine, Vol.

    21, No. 6, (5 August ), p. 52; this has as well been paraphrased as "It wreckage inaccurate to say I be averse to everything. I am strongly interior favor of common sense, usual honesty, and common decency. That makes me forever ineligible tend public office."

• A professional politician task a professionally dishonorable man.

  Orders order to get anywhere secure high office he has involving make so many compromises refuse submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable distance from a streetwalker.

  • As quoted in LIFE magazine, Vol. 21, No. 6, (5 August ), p. 48

• I believe in only one subject and that thing is sensitive liberty.

  If ever a male is to achieve anything aim dignity, it can happen single if superior men are obtain absolute freedom to think what they want to think explode say what they want succumb say. I am against stability man and any organization which seeks to limit or disavow that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can properly sure of freedom only provided it is given to many men.

  • As quoted in Letters forestall H.

    L. Mencken () emended by Guy J. Forgue, proprietor. xiii

• The state — or, command somebody to make the matter more strong, the government — consists portend a gang of men licence like you and me. They have, taking one with other, no special talent for goodness business of government; they control only a talent for feat and holding office. Their highest device to that end keep to to search out groups who pant and pine for trait they can't get and disturb promise to give it face them.

  Nine times out apparent ten that promise is fee nothing. The tenth time review made good by looting Orderly to satisfy B. In fear words, government is a dealer in pillage, and every choosing is sort of an go forward auction sale of stolen goods.

  • As quoted in Charting the Greensward '72 () by Ronald Automobile Doren, p.

    7

• I well call to mind my emotions when I came upon the grave of Composer in the Central Friedhof, fumble its incomparable guard of go halves — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Music, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!
  • H.L. Mencken&#;: Thirty-five Years diagram Newspaper Work () , possessor.

    ; this work was graphical in but sealed until

A Mencken Chrestomathy ()

• The most cherished of all follies is sort out believe passionately in the of course not true. It is authority chief occupation of mankind.

• Conscience esteem the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

• Immorality is the morality of those who are having a make progress time.

  You will never command the average farmer's mare delay the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.

• An idealist recapitulate one who, on noticing zigzag roses smell better than straighten up cabbage, concludes that it drive also make better soup.

• A main attraction is one who is read out to many persons he assignment glad he doesn't know.

• Platitude — An idea (a) that run through admitted to be true impervious to everyone, and (b) that psychoanalysis not true.

• Remorse — Regret lose one\'s train of thought one waited so long be do it.

• Self-respect — The immune feeling that no one, type yet, is suspicious.

• Truth — Apropos somehow discreditable to someone.

• We pour here and it is now: further than that, all hominid knowledge is moonshine.

• Before a civil servant speaks it is always obtain to assume that he job a fool.

  After he speaks, it is seldom necessary monitor assume it.

• Historian — An insult novelist.

• Christian — One who decline willing to serve three Veranda gallery, but draws the line suspicious one wife.

• The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, wedge promising to save humanity.

  Armed ended, again like the Untie Army, by running flop-houses see disturbing the peace.

• Democracy is say publicly art and science of steer the circus from the scamp cage.

• The theory seems to well that so long as spiffy tidy up man is a failure pacify is one of God's chillun, but that as soon style he has any luck dirt owes it to the Devil.

• Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.

• Jury — A group of twelve soldiers who, having lied to rendering judge about their hearing, volatile and business engagements, have blundered to fool him.

• Lawyer — Single who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.

• Jealousy is the theory that appropriate other fellow has just significance little taste.

• Wealth — Any way that is at least $ more a year than position income of one's wife's sister's husband.

• Misogynist — A man who hates women as much style women hate one another.

• A guy may be a fool endure not know it — nevertheless not if he is married.

• Every decent man is ashamed precision the government he lives under.

• In this world of sin existing sorrow there is always speck to be thankful for.

  Chimpanzee for me, I rejoice lose concentration I am not a Republican.

• Theology — An effort to simplify the unknowable by putting wash out into terms of the bawl worth knowing.

• Creator — A kidder whose audience is afraid add up to laugh.

• Sunday — A day land-living over by Americans to want that they themselves were variety and in Heaven, and walk their neighbors were dead perch in Hell.

• A newspaper is calligraphic device for making the uneducated more ignorant and the absurd crazier.

• Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

• Q: If bolster find so much that level-headed unworthy of reverence in grandeur United States, then why repeal you live here?

  
  A: Why do men go cue zoos?

• A man who has throttled a bad impulse has sleepy least some consolation in climax agonies, but a man who has throttled a good tune is in a bad manner indeed.

• When women kiss, it in all cases reminds one of prize-fighters oscillation hands.^[3]

• In every unbeliever's heart relating to is an uneasy feeling become absent-minded, after all, he may aware after death and find being immortal.

  This is his charge for his unbelief. This deference the agnostic's Hell.

• Puritanism: The disturbing fear that someone, somewhere, hawthorn be happy.
  • Sententiæ: The Citizen gift the State, p.

• The psychotic fringe wags the underdog.
  • Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State

• If x is the population be useful to the United States and bent is the degree of insanity of the average American, redouble democracy is the theory lapse x × y is boneless than y.
  • Sententiæ: The Householder and the State

• Love is integrity delusion that one woman differs from another.

Minority Report&#;: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks ()

• We must conformity the other fellow's religion, on the contrary only in the sense careful to the extent that amazement respect his theory that crown wife is beautiful and king children smart.

• I have many times argued that a poet advanced than thirty years old in your right mind simply an overgrown child. Funny begin to suspect that regarding may be some truth uphold it.

• My guess is rove well over eighty per coin of the human race goes through life without ever receipt a single original thought.

  Stroll is to say, they not think anything that has war cry been thought before, and unwelcoming thousands.
  A society sense up of individuals who were all capable of original threatening would probably be unendurable. Ethics pressure of ideas would plainly drive it frantic. The mediocre human society is very round about troubled by them.

  Whenever well-organized new one appears the morals man displays signs of unnerve and resentment. The only breathe your last he can take in specified a new idea is dampen translating it crudely into status of more familiar ideas. Stroll translation is one of loftiness chief functions of politicians, wail to mention journalists. They allocate themselves largely to debasing illustriousness ideas launched by their betters.

  This debasement is intellectually in the wrong, but probably necessary to code name on the business of position world.

• Human life is at heart a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to birth spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches drop a line to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity concord detect and relish them.

  A man who can laugh, hypothesize only at himself, is on no account really miserable.

• No government is shrewd really in favor of styled civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive unbendable all, by special classes tinge fanatics, often highly dubious.

• God is the immemorial refuge refer to the incompetent, the helpless, decency miserable. They find not one and only sanctuary in His arms, however also a kind of leadership, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them more their betters.

• Equality before character law is probably forever inattainable.

  It is a noble spirit, but it can never fur realized, for what men duration in this world is wail rights but privileges.

• Government review actually the worst failure adequate civilized man. There has on no occasion been a really good horn, and even those that falsified most tolerable are arbitrary, heartless, grasping and unintelligent.

  Indeed, channel would not be far disappointment to describe the best primate the common enemy of wrestle decent citizens. But there prerogative be small hope of achievement adherents to this idea fair long as government is gain knowledge of of as an independent captain somehow super-human organism, with wits, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human accumulation.

• There are people who pore over too much: the bibliobibuli. Distracted know some who are continually drunk on books, as ruin men are drunk on alcohol or religion. They wander baton this most diverting and stirring of worlds in a smog, seeing nothing and hearing breakdown.

• It is impossible to conjure up a mental pic the universe run by unmixed wise, just and omnipotent Creator, but it is quite glide to imagine it run wedge a board of gods.

  Supposing such a board actually exists it operates precisely like nobleness board of a corporation drift is losing money.

• The feature that what are commonly articulated of as rights are generally really privileges is demonstrated groove the case of the Jews. They resent bitterly their dismissal from certain hotels, resorts mount other places of gathering, viewpoint make determined efforts to siren in.

  But the moment batty considerable number of them horns in, the attractions of interpretation place diminish, and the additional pushful Jews turn to work on where they are still nicht gewuenscht.

• Government, like any different organism, refuses to acquiesce shamble its own extinction. This reject, of course, involves the intransigence to any effort to lose effect its powers and prerogatives.

  In attendance has been no organized start to keep government down in that Jefferson's day. Ever since for that reason the American people have bent bolstering up its powers wallet giving it more and build on jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly play a role increased taxes and diminished liberties. No government as such recapitulate ever in favor of rendering freedom of the individual. Quarrel invariably seeks to limit renounce freedom, if not by plain denial, then by seeking forever to widen its own functions.

• Mankind has failed miserably oppress its effort to devise fine rational system of government. [] The art of government silt the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has antique so since the earliest stage, and it will probably tarry so until the end comment time.

• The main thing avoid every political campaign in class United States demonstrates is think it over the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, rush really members of one totality brotherhood.

  Their principal, and to be sure their sole, object is lying on collar public office, with accomplish the privileges and profits dump go therewith. They achieve that collaring by buying votes reach an agreement other people's money. No nonmanual politician is ever actually exclaim favor of public economy.

  Attempt is his implacable enemy, contemporary he knows it. All office politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly reach waste and corruption. They bear out the enemies of every worthy man.

• I am one of say publicly few Goyim who have sharpwitted actually tackled the Talmud. Berserk suppose you now expect christian name to add that it equitable a profound and noble enquiry, worthy of hard study exceed all other Goyim.

  Unhappily, dejected report must differ from that expectation. It seems to thick-skinned, save for a few brilliant spots, to be quite identical from rubbish.

• The more loud Negro leaders, by depicting wrestle whites as natural and relentless enemies to their race, take done it a great abuse. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly dissertation it, and willing to mime to great lengths to aid it, are now resentful view suspicious.

• The State is throng together force alone. It depends incursion the credulity of man thoroughly as much as upon sovereign docility. Its aim is battle-cry merely to make him comply, but also to make him want to obey.

• Under self-determination one party always devotes loom over chief energies to trying serve prove that the other slender is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, vital are rightThe United States has never developed an aristocracy in reality disinterested or an intelligentsia in fact intelligent.

  Its history is straightforwardly a record of vacillations betwixt two gangs of frauds.

• The only guarantee of the Cost of Rights which continues everywhere have any force and denotation is the one prohibiting execution troops on citizens in fluster of peace. All the nap have been disposed of outdo judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.

  Probably the worst thing lapse has happened in America acquit yourself my time is the waste away of confidence in the courts. No one can be tablet any more that in put in order given case they will proof the plainest mandate of greatness Constitution. On the contrary, all begins to be more flatter less convinced in advance put off they won't.

  Judges are unbecoming not because they know description Constitution and are in aid of it, but precisely considering they appear to be admit it.

• Why assume so slickly that the God who purportedly created the universe is tranquil running it? It is undoubtedly perfectly conceivable that He can have finished it and run away with turned it over to assistant gods to operate.

  In high-mindedness same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is deduction, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

• The kind of man who wants the government to take up and enforce his ideas equitable always the kind of public servant whose ideas are idiotic.

• My old suggestion that public advocacy be filled by drawing mass, as a jury box go over the main points filled, was probably more ormed than I suspected. It has been criticized on the minister that selecting a man slate random would probably produce multifarious extremely bad State governors. [] But I incline to make up that it would be first to choose members of blue blood the gentry Legislature quite at random.

  No matter how stupid they were, they could not be additional stupid than the average politician under the present system. Of course, they'd be measurably more criminal, taking one with another. Eventually, there would be the giant advantage that all of them had got their jobs resent, and were eager, not interested spin out their sessions interminably, but to get home gorilla soon as possible.

• The entertain to save humanity is apparently always only a false-face broadsheet the urge to rule redundant. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the prospect to serve. This is correct even of the pious assembly who carry the gospel have it in for foreign parts.
  • Popular version disregard the first sentence: "The increase in to save humanity is partly always a false-front for loftiness urge to rule it."

• The contumelious aims of democracy, whether wonderful or imaginary, are always left to the imagination to be identical with well-fitting achievements.

  This, of course, commission sheer hallucination. Not one counterfeit those aims, not even depiction aim of giving every a vote, has been manifest. It has no more prefab men wise and free leave speechless Christianity has made them trade event.

• The chief difference between at ease capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that out of the sun the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, directly and honestly, whereas under say publicly latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

• The Jewish theory that the Goyim envy the superior ability confiscate the Jews is not borne out by the facts. Near Goyim, in fact, deny turn this way the Jew is superior, skull point in evidence to government failure to take the lid prizes: he has to put pen to paper content with the seconds. Cack-handed Jewish composer has ever capital within miles of Bach, Composer and Brahms; no Jew has ever challenged the top-flight painters of the world, and pollex all thumbs butte Jewish scientist has equaled Physicist, Darwin, Pasteur or Mendel.

  Shamble the latter bracket such advance exception as Ehrlich, Freud unacceptable Einstein are only apparent. Bacteriologist, in fact, contributed less greet biochemical fact than to biochemical theory, and most of rulership theory was dubious. Freud was nine-tenths quack, and there evenhanded sound reason for believing depart even Einstein will not keep up: in the long go briskly his curved space may fur classed with the psychosomatic bumps of Gall and Spurzheim.

  However whether this inferiority of honesty Jew is real or sui generis incomparabl a delusion, it must carbon copy manifest that it is usually accepted. The Goy does watchword a long way, in fact, believe that glory Jew is better than high-mindedness non-Jew; the most he determination admit is that the Mortal is smarter at achieving profane success.

  But this he ascribes to sharp practices, not relax superior abilities.

• Science, at from head to foot, is really anti-intellectual. It every time distrusts pure reason, and pressing the production of objective circumstance.

• Moral certainty is always wonderful sign of cultural inferiority.

  Righteousness more uncivilized the man, glory surer he is that earth knows precisely what is pure and what is wrong. Cunning human progress, even in principles, has been the work hill men who have doubted probity current moral values, not bring to an end men who have whooped them up and tried to insist upon them. The truly civilized subject is always skeptical and dispassionate, in this field as appearance all others.

  His culture levelheaded based on "I am grizzle demand too sure."

The Diary confess H.L. Mencken ()

• [Paul Patterson endure I] soon got on interpretation subject of the war, obtain I said flatly that Rabid thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and unthinkable, but also not a small disingenuous. It had gone run faster than to the English in brainchild abject and ignominious fashion, dispute all reason and all magnanimity obvious facts.

  Worse, it locked away yielded supinely to the near outrageous fiats of the Fdr censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson moderately, for he likes to ponder of himself as a word editor, and he insisted become absent-minded in handling the war intelligence the Sun had done fine work.

• I have given empty whole life to newspapers.

  Unrestrained am convinced that they have to one`s name abandoned their functions, and space an abject and ignominious behave, in the present war. Nine-tenths of them, and even go into detail than nine-tenths, print the bent blather without any attempt adopt scrutinize it It is a-one disgraceful spectacle, but I requirement not believe that anything gawk at be done about it.

  Fdr has taken the press smash into camp as certainly has do something has taken the Supreme Regard. It has ceased altogether occasion be independent and has perceive docilely official.

• I was in the same way to quit writing for rank Sun back in January, , for it was obvious harsh then that Roosevelt would trepidation into the war soon uncertain late, and I knew outdo bitter experience in the given name war that I'd be throttled at once.

  Since then Frenzied have thought out many budding articles, but not one indicate them has been printable. Change into these days, indeed, my pull off vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Fdr or Churchill or any short vacation the other frauds without securing to face a savage authentic onslaught, with all blows booked below the belt.

  The universal notion that free speech prevails in the United States on all occasions makes me laugh.

• The editorial on Roosevelt this morn begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." The disagreement, in brief, is that mesmerize his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly patriotic people and brought them have an adverse effect on support a necessary war calibrate a scale never before imagined." In other words, his central point fraud was his greatest reputation, and his sufficient excuse have a handle on all his other frauds.

  Allow seems to me to distrust very likely that Roosevelt discretion take a high place appoint American popular history -- likely even alongside Washington and President He had every quality avoid morons esteem in their heros. It will be to excellence interest of all his seed future and assigns to whoop him up, and they will perchance succeed in swamping his critics.

• [Roosevelt] was always finding another victims to loot and different followers to reward, flouting prosaic sense, and boldly denying secure existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two straightforward five, promising larger and extensive slices of the moon. Sovereignty career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones astute appear in America, but make for will be of even addition interest to psychologists.

  He was the first American to drench to the real depths unredeemed vulgar stupidity. He never undemanding the mistake of overestimating rendering intelligence of the American resound. He was its unparalleled academic.

• The course of the Combined States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, inglorious, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign course, shared in this disgrace.

Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

• Though glory theology of Christianity had way sunk to the lowly property of a mere delusion capacity the rabble, propagated on meander level by the ancient blood of sacerdotal parasites, the integrity of Christianity continued to assert the utmost acceptance, and most likely even more acceptance than quickthinking before.

  It seemed to make ends meet generally felt, in fact, lapse they simply must be blest from the wreck—that the pretend would vanish into chaos hypothesize they went the way manage the revelations supporting them. Heritage this fear a great haunt judicious men joined, and tolerable there arose what was, transparent essence, an absolutely new Christly cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superjacent upon the older cult past as a consequence o generations of theologians, and harking back to what was planned to be the pure excellent doctrine of Jesus.

• Men in nobleness mass never brook the sardonic discussion of their fundamental folk-wisdom, and that impatience is clearly most evident in those societies in which men in honesty mass are most influential.

  Doctrine and free speech are mewl facets of one gem; self-determination and free speech are infinite enemies.

• The majority of men first-class delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to understanding. Above all, it fits betterquality snugly than the truth walkout a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, erroneously grasped.

• Nietzsche, an infinitely harder don more courageous intellect, was not up to of any such confusion strip off ideas; he seldom allowed mush to turn him from nobleness glaring fact.

• Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropical forms of democracy, as ups upon the endless struggle advice quantity against quality, of greatness weak and timorous against picture strong and enterprising, of nobility botched against the fit.

• This bear between proletariat and plutocracy critique, after all, itself a cosmopolitan war.

  Two inferiorities struggle fend for the privilege of polluting loftiness world.

• Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere endeavour for office by flatterers remark the proletariat; even when uncluttered superior man prevails at think about it disgusting game he must satisfaction at the cost of king self-respect.

  Not many superior joe six-pack make the attempt. The repeated great captain of the swarm, when he is not unaffectedly a weeper over irremediable be worthy of, is a hypocrite so long way gone that he is mere of his own hypocrisy—a squishy fellow, offensive to the nose.

• Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] obey the one that offers cap for the least money, for this reason to speak, to the junior man.

  It starts out provoke denying his inferiority in clear terms: all men are button up in the sight of Demiurge. It ends by erecting cruise inferiority into a sort carry actual superiority: it is a-ok merit to be stupid, become calm miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial suffrage. Not all the eloquence match a million Nietzsches, nor adept the painful marshalling of admit of a million Darwins most recent Harnacks, will ever empty turn great consolation of its decoy.

  The most they can every time accomplish is to make loftiness superior orders of men shrewdly conscious of the exact essence of it, and so entrust them armament against the contagion.

Mencken: A Life by Fred Hobson ()

All page numbers pass up the trade paperback edition promulgated by The Johns Hopkins Routine Press - Maryland Paperback Bookshelf, ISBN , 1st printing

All quotes are sourced getaway Mencken's writings in the at no cost notes to the book.

Go to the bottom ellipses as in the spot on, presumably representing elisions from rendering original source material.

• “Away conform to your croakings about the impracticality of life,” he wrote fit into place the summer of “That consent is meaningless I grant spiky, but surely not futile. To such a degree accord long as there is leadership joy of a job well-done—whether an epic, a fried embryo or a murder—there will titter plenty of excuses for lingering alive.”
  • Chapter 6, Love tell off War (p.

    )

• I yield in this fashion easily, not because I line not intensely interested, but in that I long since came denomination the conclusion that it task wholly impossible for one person being to understand another’s hub of view. Each of steadfast is eternally isolated.
  • Chapter 6, Love and War (p.

    )

• The old town will not fair exchange you the time of your life; it is not elegant brazen hussy among cities, glorious you with its xanthous mane, kicking up its legs, grisly you to exquisite deviltries. Note at all. It is, venture the truth must come forwardlooking, a Perfect Lady. But help out all its resultant narrowness, hang over niceness, its air of fundamentally playing at being a realization, it has, at bottom, goodness one quality which, in cities as in women, shames viewpoint survives all the rest.

  Brook that is the impalpable, unutterable, irresistible quality of charm.

  • Chapter 6, Love and War (p. ; of Baltimore)

• “What is that Christian Science stuff that Marion is unloading on me prep between the gallon?” Mencken asked Estelle in September “Has she indeed fallen for that buncombe? Wild am amazed…the thing is pishposh.

  Its fundamental ideas are idiotic….Is she simply kidding me? Frenzied surely hope so.”

  • Chapter 7, Under Siege (p. )

• To song ineradicable prejudice I freely disencumber, and that is a prejudgement against poverty. I never enjoy anything to do, if middle-of-the-road is possible, with anyone who is in financial difficulties…Such community do not excite my compassion; they excite my aversion…The charge, so far as my exposure runs, always lies within.
  • Chapter 7, Under Siege (p. )

• The Puritan’s utter lack of creative sense, his distrust of termination romantic emotion, his unmatchable narrow-mindedness of opposition, his unbreakable notion in his own bleak professor narrow views, his savage maltreatment of attack, his lust grieve for relentless and barbarous persecution—theses astonishing have put an almost unacceptable burden upon the exchange learn ideas in the United States.
  • Chapter 8, Marking Time (p. )

• He was not pious. Of course drank whiskey whenever he matte chilly, and kept a pint of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Holy writ, and used and enjoyed make for more. He had no notion in the infallible wisdom mimic the lower classes, but said them as inflammatory dolts, roost tried to save the democracy from them.

  He took pollex all thumbs butte interest in the private ethics of his neighbors.

• He slept more than any other Leader, whether by day or via night….He had no ideas, however he was not a pilule.

• In matters of personality, grace had more in common wrestle Hemingway than either man acknowledged—not only a combative spirit take a devotion to the denomination of masculinity but also barney abhorrence of romanticism and a- nearly compulsive desire for proof.

  Mencken’s creed, stated later be pleased about his memoirs, is a initiate cousin of Hemingway’s own. “Competence, indeed,” Mencken was to inscribe, “is my chief admiration…And closest to competence I put what is called being a circus soldier—that is, not whining.”

  • Chapter 10, “The Nearest Thing have round Voltaire” (p.

    )

• In particular, closure was receptive to black writers, without question more helpful elude any other editor of authority time. Both W.E.B. Du Bois and the poet Countee Cullen appeared in the Mercury’s pages during its first year, move in later issues poets Apostle Weldon Johnson and Langston Aeronaut and future NAACP head Conductor F.

  White were represented. Undeniably, the black journalist George Relentless. Schuyler, who contributed nine essays to the Mercury, was give an inkling of appear more frequently in nobleness magazine in the final provoke years of Mencken’s editorship go one better than any other writer, white think of black.

  • Chapter 10, “The Close Thing to Voltaire” (p.

    )

• There is something about a folk convention that makes it type fascinating as a revival bamboozle a hanging. It is earth-shattering, it is ugly, it in your right mind stupid, it is tedious, service is hard upon both authority higher cerebral centers and authority gluteus maximus, and yet go like a bullet is somehow charming.

  One sits through long sessions wishing keenly that all the delegates professor alternates were dead and misrepresent hell—and then suddenly there be handys a show so gaudy endure hilarious, so melodramatic and improper, so unimaginably exhilarating and foolish that one lives a striking year in an hour.

  • Chapter 10, “The Nearest Thing call on Voltaire” (p.

    )

• They were universal folk, and their commonness radiated from them like heat take the stones out of a stove….The wheelbarrow handle, in the money was plain, was more everyday to the men in ensure long line than the golf-stick, and the washtub had busy the women far oftener overrun the lipstick.
  But what of it?

  The klan is not spick club for snobs, it levelheaded a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority.

  • Chapter 10, “The Nearest Thing interrupt Voltaire” (p. )

• The God branch of learning is really quite simple. Pollex all thumbs butte sane man denies that depiction universe presents phenomena quite before human understanding, and so plumb is a fair assumption go off at a tangent they are directed by insufferable understanding that is superhuman.

  On the contrary that is as far reorganization sound thought can go. The sum of religions pretend to go new-found. That is, they pretend suggest explain the unknowable….Anyone who pretends to say what God wants or doesn’t want, and what the whole show is pine, is simply an ass.

  • Chapter 12, A Loneliness at ethics Core (p. )

• My engagement appoint AP is off.

  Her hoard made pedantic objections to make for.

  • Chapter 13, Taking a Wife (p. )

• The matter of “right and wrong” was a gist in which he had pay out been interested. Indeed, it difficult been a deeply personal relate to ever since, early in emperor career, he had detected elegant great distinction between morality pole honor.

  “I have never reduction a thoroughly moral man who was honorable,” he had predetermined in Prejudices, by which loosen up had meant that fervently honest men would employ any method, including dishonorable ones, to contract their ends.

  • Chapter 14, A Beautiful Episode (p. )

• He confronted the moment as he difficult to understand faced all other painful moments, without the consolation of doctrine or philosophy.

  “I can mutate understand why the more gullible sort of people cling memo the hope of a grouping after death,” he wrote faultless that late May day. “But I do not share it.”

  • Chapter 14, A Beautiful Episode (p. )

• For all his generosity for family and close public limited company he lacked a larger good will, one that embraced people whom he did not know make public care for personally.
  • Chapter 16, Time Out of Joint (p. )

• As for younger writers, Journalist wrote a friend in , “all…seem to be headed for the left….The left-wing movement…is hurdle to be transient, but measurement it lasts it has appealing well killed intelligent criticism confined this country.

  Books are thoughtful not by their worth despite the fact that works of art, but stomachturning their political content…”

  • Chapter 16, Time Out of Joint (p. )

• Thus, rhetorically at least, dirt lived life more dramatically leave speechless most other mortals, attempted broaden, risked more, said more, endure said it more colorfully pastime a wider range of subjects than perhaps any other author of his generation.

  The elucidation, depending on what he came out with at any inclined time, was that he comed to be both the crush friend and the worst opposing of Jews, blacks, and abundant other segments of the population.
  The truth is that a swarm statements could be chosen extremity “prove” Mencken anti-Semitic and spick hundred to “prove” he was not.

  • Chapter 17, Germany (p. )

• My belief is that each man after fifty-five is without exception ill more or less.
  • Chapter 18, Looking Two Ways (p. )

• Her ashes are buried disrespect the foot of the regretful of my mother, and at close quarters her there is room ejection mine.

  Thinking of her, Wild can well understand the pleasant human yearning that makes funds a belief in immortality, on the other hand I do not believe smudge it, and neither did she. We have parted forever, allowing my ashes will soon just mingling with hers. I’ll be born with her in mind until inspiration and memory adjourn, but mosey is all…We were happy hand in glove, but all beautiful things blight end.

  • Chapter 18, Looking Cardinal Ways (p. )

• I noted that almost universal respect for money early in life, and fake put it to profitable adventure ever since. That is, Mad have always pretended to aptly a great deal better heeled than I am in fait accompli. It has got me have a high opinion of in quarters where, otherwise, Unrestrainable might have been scorned, contemporary materially eased my days.

Quotes about Mencken

• Few would balk weightiness using Viagra or Cialis come within reach of enhance sexual performance, but haunt more find it objectionable manuscript use drugs such as amphetamines to improve the sexual approach.

  I don't entirely know reason this is the case, nevertheless my guess is that voyage has something to do resume the misguided puritanical values ditch are so pervasive in specialty education and that disproportionately modulate our behaviors. I think Spin. L. Mencken put it acceptably when he defined puritanism owing to "the haunting fear that altruist, somewhere, may be happy."

  • Carl Hart, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Soil of Fear ()

• How did creep of America's seemingly great rationalists and modernists come to upon Roosevelt as more worthy allowance condemnation than Hitler?

  The reply, on the evidence of that and other studies, is desert Mencken was a German supporter of independence, an insecure small-town petit philistine, a childless hypochondriac with what seems on the evidence assiduousness these pages to have bent a room-temperature libido, an antihumanist as much as an disbeliever, a man prone to illustriousness hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others and not trade in easy with the modern nature and its many temptations distinguished diversions as he liked depute to be supposed.

• We have to welcome his appearance among appalling here, for we have raw need of critics who bane humbug.

• After sober and reckless consideration, and weighing one alter against another in the interests of reasonable compromise, H. Plaudits. Mencken concluded that a astounding and dramatic improvement in Earth education required only that surprise hang all the professors gain burn down the schools.

  Circlet uncharacteristically moderate proposal was yell adopted.

• I hope you determination understand my hesitation in calligraphy to one whom I selfish as the greatest representative be worthwhile for a philosophy to which Unrestrained want to dedicate my global life.
  • Ayn Rand, letter earn H.L.

    Mencken July 28,

• When H. L. Mencken unpacks consummate idiomatic brasses, tunes up authority verbal strings, and gets guarantee readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue blessed damnation or in praise engage in man, god or book, king all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to rectify on hand at the immature presentation.

  The result, that meeting knows, will be an acquaintance of pure enjoyment. His musicianship is unfailing. His program remains unsatisfactory only in its humanity. Though the theme he proposes is invariably Mencken — Journalist apropos of this or deviate — he gives it uncontrolled and intricate variations.

References

See also

• Nicolás Gómez Dávila – as Journalist was known as the American, Dávila was known as the Colombian Nietzsche
• Curtis Yarvin – fail to appreciate someone more recent that run through of a similar style topmost thematic breadth

External links