WIST

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
In Defense of Women (1923)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)