WIST

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man’s possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“Homo Neanderthalensis,” Baltimore Evening Sun (29 Jun 1925)
Full text.

The ideal government … is one which lets the individual alone — one which barely escapes being no government at all.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“Matters of State: Le Contrat Social,” Prejudices: Third Series (1922)

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“Mr. Mencken Sounds Off,” interview, LIFE Magazine (5 Aug 1946)

The Bill of Rights was designed  trustfully to prohibit forever two of the favorite crimes of all known governments: the seizure of private property without adequate compensation and the invasion of the citizen’s liberty without justifiable cause and due process.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“On Government” (2), Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924)

The man who is thought to be poor never gets a fair chance. No one wants to listen to him. No one gives a damn what he thinks or knows or feels. No one has any desire for his good opinion. I discovered this principle early in life, and have put it to use ever since.
I have got a great deal more out of men (and women) by having the name of being a well-heeled fellow than I have ever got by being decent to them, or by dazzling them with my sagacity, or by hard industry, or by a personal beauty that is singular and ineffable.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“Smart Set” (May 1920)

Thus I advise against suicide. Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perhaps a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband’s clothes.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot!” The American Mercury (Apr 1928)
Review of R. Cavan, Suicide. Full text.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917)
Reprinted in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy, ch. 25 (1949)

The row was over Darwinism, but before it ended Darwinism was almost forgotten. What Huxley fought for was something far greater: the right of civilized men to think freely and speak freely, without asking leave of authority, clerical or lay. How new that right is! And yet how firmly held! Today it would be hard to imagine living without it. No man of self-respect, when he has a thought to utter, pauses to wonder what the bishops will have to say about it. The views of bishops are simply ignored. Yet only sixty years ago they were still so powerful that they gave Huxley the battle of his life.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“Thomas Henry Huxley,” Baltimore Evening Sun (4 May 1925)

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

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(1918)

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

The American people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

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 are smart.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

HISTORIAN: an unsuccessful novelist.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

CLERGYMAN: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

SELF-RESPECT: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)
(also attrib Susan Ertz)

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

There comes a time in every normal man’s life when he must be tempted to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

If I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to God in a manly way and say, “Sir, I made an honest mistake.”

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)
Quoted by John Kenneth Galbraith, interview with N. Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990)

Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

Quoted by C. Matthews, Hardball: How Politics Is Played, ch. 6 (1988)

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
(Attributed)

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

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Little Book in C Major (1916)

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

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Little Book in C Major (1916)

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Little Book in C Major (1916)
He later changed this to “... concludes that it will also make better soup.” (A Book of Burlesques (1924))

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Little Book in C Major, 5.23 (1916)

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Mencken Chrestomathy, ch. 30 “The Citizen and the State” (1949)

When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Mencken Chrestomathy, ch. 30 “The Mind of Man” (1949)

CREATOR: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Mencken Chrestomathy, ch. 30 (1949)
Sometimes attributed to Voltaire.

Conscience: the inner voice which warns us someone may be looking.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
A Mencken Chrestomethy, ch. 30 “This and That” (1949)

The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. 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.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (12 Feb 1923)

What should be obvious and indisputable requires a public ceremonial to prove it! Why not a day for wearing little tin bathtubs to prove that one bathes, in the patriotic American manner, once a week? Why not white hatbands for gentlemen who are true to their wives? It is precisely the mark of the cad that he makes a public boast of what is inseparable from decency. He is the fellow who marches grandly in preparedness parades to show off his valor, his patriotism, his willingness to die for his country. He is the fellow who insults his mother by making a spectacle of the fact that he is on good terms with her.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (13 Jun. 1916)
(on Mothers Day and wearing carnations to proclaim love for one's mother)

We owe to capital the fact that the medical profession, for example, is now really useful to mankind, whereas formerly it was useful only to the charlatans who practiced it. It took accumulated money to provide the long training that medicine began to demand as it slowly lifted itself from the level of a sorry trade to that of a dignified art and science — money to keep the student while he studied and his teachers while they instructed him, and more money to pay for the expensive housing and materials that they needed. In the main, all that money came from private capitalists. But whether it came from private capitalists or from the common treasury, it was always capital, which is to say, it was always part of an accumulated surplus. It never could have been provided out of the hand-to-mouth income of a non-capitalistic society.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (14-Jan-1935)

The most a lawyer ever demands of the victim before him is that he be hanged, but the meekest clergyman is constantly proposing to doom his opponents to endless tortures in lakes of boiling brimstone.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (17 Dec. 1927)

The Fathers who invented it [democracy], if they could return from Hell, would never recognize it. It was conceived as a free government of free men; it has become simply a battle of charlatans for the votes of idiots.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (26 Apr 1937)

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

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Chrestomathy

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 (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
In Defense of Women, ch. 13 (1922)

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized a man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)

When I hear a man applauded by the mob, I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly, and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretences.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks, #397 (1956)

Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Minority Report

I’ve made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
New York Post (18 Sep 1945)

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Notes on Democracy, “The Disease of Democracy” (1926)
Full text.

The finest fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and disreputable.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Notes on Democracy, 1.8 (1926)

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily 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.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices, First Series (1919)

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel to the Treaty of Versailles, have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers. But all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs to Terrapin à la Maryland, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from well water to something with color to it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924)

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices: Second Series, “A Popular Virtue” (1920)

A good half of the humor of the late Mark Twain consisted of admitting frankly the possession of vices and weaknesses that all of us have and few care to acknowledge. Practically all of the sagacity of George Bernard Shaw consists of bellowing vociferously what everyone knows.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices: The First Series, “The Ulster Problem” (1919)

Every third American devotes himself to improving and uplifting his fellow-citizens, usually by force.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices

No man is genuinely happy, married, who has to drink worse gin than he used to drink when he was single.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Prejudices, “Reflections on Monogamy” (1919-27)

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Smart Set (August 1919)

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection — the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Smart Set (May 1920)

The man who is unable to laugh at his god is a man who does not quite believe in his god. In the Middle Ages, when Christians were really Christians, the burlesque mass flourished, and even bishops took part in it. Today, with not enough faith left in Christendom to make a single martyr, a burlesque mass would end in a lynching — and Jews and Protestants would help pull the rope.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Smart Set, “Pertinent and Impertinent” [as Owen Hatteras] (Jun 1913)
Full text.

Democracy is the theory that intelligence is dangerous. It assumes that no idea can be safe until those who can’t understand it have approved it. It defines truth as anything which at least fifty-one men in every hundred believe. Thus it is firmly committed to the doctrines that one bath a week is enough, that “I seen” is the past tense of “I see,” and that Friday is an unlucky day.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Smart Set, “Pertinent and Impertinent” [as Owen Hatteras] (Jun 1913)
Full text.

We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only great, but also a man: that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of steaks.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Baltimore Evening Sun (15 Jun 1936)
Full text.

I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Letter to Edgar R. Dawson (3 Dec 1937)

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 plain people. Nor has nyhone ever lost public office thereby.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
Notes on Journalism, Chicago Tribune (19 Sep 1926)
Popularly, "Nobody ever went broke understimating the intelligence of the American people."

The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game…. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of chiropractic, astrology or cannibalism.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
“The Library,” The American Mercury (May 1930)
Book review of The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (1930)