H.+L.+Mencken

=H. L. Mencken=

(See Biography Of) (Return to Wise Quotes) (Return to Literature Archives)


 * Quotes**

1. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

2. A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

3. A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

4. A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

5. An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

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

7. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

8. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

9. Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

10. For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

11. It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

12. It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

13. Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

14. Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

15. Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

16. Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

17. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

18. The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

19. The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

20. The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

21. To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

22. 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.

(See Biography Of) (Return to Wise Quotes) (Return to Literature Archives)