H. L. Mencken Quotes

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H. L. Mencken Quotes

Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956), was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s.

During the first half of the twentieth century, H. L. Mencken was the most outspoken defender of liberty in America. He spent thousands of dollars challenging restrictions on freedom of the press. 

He boldly denounced President Woodrow Wilson for whipping up patriotic fervor to enter World War I, which cost his job as a newspaper columnist. 

Mencken denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt for amassing dangerous political power and for manoeuvring to enter World War II, and he again lost his newspaper job. Moreover, the President ridiculed him by name.

“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life,” Mencken declared. “When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.”

Though intensely controversial, Mencken earned respect as America’s foremost newspaperman and literary critic. 

He produced an estimated ten million words: some 30 books, contributions to 20 more books and thousands of newspaper columns. He wrote some 100,000 letters, or between 60 and 125 per working day. 

He hunted-and-pecked every word with his two forefingers—for years, he used a little Corona typewriter about the size of a cigar box.

Mencken had interesting things to say about politics, literature, food, health, religion, sports, and much more, people still read Mencken’s work today. 

Quotes:

1. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
2. No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
3. Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
4. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
5. Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
6. The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
7. The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
8. Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
9. Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
10. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
11. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
12. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
13. Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
14. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
15. A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know
16. A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
17. For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
18. A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
19. Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
20. Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.
21. Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
22. Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
23. Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
24. Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
25. It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just, and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

[bluescope]

26. The outcome of any committee is a catastrophe.

 

(19. Hey Donald! He was talking about YOU!!!)