H. L. Mencken
The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.Collection: Pride
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.Collection: Love
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.Collection: Freedom
[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.Collection: Government
A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.Collection: Depressing
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.Collection: War
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]Collection: Eye
The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.Collection: Gossip
To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.Collection: Believe
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.Collection: Men
As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far - much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.Collection: Believe
All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.Collection: War
Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.Collection: Conceited
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.Collection: People
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.Collection: Love
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.Collection: Men
The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.Collection: Dog
In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.Collection: Love
It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.Collection: Winning
I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.Collection: Thinking
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.Collection: Nineteen
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies. When they fail to come off its clergy simply say that they will be realized later on. Thus, if we have another boom, they will argue that the collapse of capitalism is only postponed. The fact that the greatest booms ever heard of followed Marx's formal prophecy of the downfall of capitalism is already forgotten, just as millions have long since forgotten the early Christian prophecy that the end of the world was at hand. The first Christians accepted postponements as docilely as the Communists of today.Collection: Christian
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.Collection: Husband
He who eats alone chokes alone.Collection: Dining Alone
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.Collection: Love
In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.Collection: Eye
The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.Collection: Philosophical
When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.Collection: Life
Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.Collection: Comforting
The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.Collection: Heaven
I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.Collection: Race
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.Collection: Public Opinion
I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.Collection: Believe
I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.Collection: Depressing
The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.Collection: Dog
Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.Collection: Animal
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty.Collection: Believe
No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.Collection: Lying
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.Collection: Funny
People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.Collection: Men
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.Collection: Jobs
The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims; so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost.Collection: Son
Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.Collection: Government
The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.Collection: Hero
A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.Collection: Writing
The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.Collection: Death
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.Collection: Cities
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.Collection: Freedom
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.Collection: Life