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H. L. Mencken Quotes

Total quotes: 16
“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”
— H. L. Mencken, The Collected Drama of H. L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism
Tagged: Love, War, Relationship
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”
— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report
Tagged: Power, Messiah Complex, Savior Complex
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
— H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women
Tagged: Politics, hobgoblins, Moral Panic
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
— H. L. Mencken, A Little Book In C Major
Tagged: Democracy
“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report
Tagged: Secrets, Unknowable
“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
— H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First
Tagged: Faith, Illogical, Improbable
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report
Tagged: Democracy, Two-Party System
“...Americans always want to do what everyone else is doing. If we could spread the impression that the book is a success, it might really become one.”
— H. L. Mencken, Mencken: The American Iconoclast
Tagged: Strangers, Public Relations
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
— H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
Tagged: Conscience, Inner Voice, voyeur, Paranoia
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
— H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
Tagged: Puritanism, Envy
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...”
— H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First
Tagged: dangerous, Government, taboos, Superstition
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
— H. L. Mencken, H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series: A Library of America Boxed Set
Tagged: History Quotes
“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”
— H. L. Mencken, Heliogobalus
Tagged: Love, War
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
— H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy
Tagged: Democracy, pathetic, Belief, Ignorance, Collective Wisdom
“One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.”
— H. L. Mencken, H. L. Mencken on Religion
Tagged: irrational, Modern Society, dubious, theologians
“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
— H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
Tagged: Government, Authority, danger, Superstition, Taboo
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