Posted on 01/28/2006 7:32:20 AM PST by Borges
"The trouble with cynicism is that, once you start,... it's never enough."
-Lily Tomlin as Trudy, the Bag Lady
Yes, but quotable.
... ping for some fun over here ...
Absolutely. Just checked my Bartlett's. I'm surprised there wasn't more there. But what was there pretty much refreshed my memory and reinforced my position.
And reading Mencken in the Carter years, his cynicism seemed about right. Mencken captured some features of American politics, culture and life that are as relevant now as they were eighty years ago.
If you come to Mencken older and have more life experience, your experience may be different. If you read his works expecting a deep thinker, you'll probably be disappointed.
Mencken fits well with times of public cynicism. When people really believe the political system is working or that the work of politicians is important, they have little time for Mencken.
In his own lifetime Mencken was popular in the 1920s, when the country more or less ran itself. In the Depression years, when people feared political collapse there was little demand for his cynicism.
Thank you so much for posting this.
Sometimes I need something heart warming -- At my favorite coffe house this morning (Where I know people) I had lots of fun passing these qutoes around.
He believed in the endurance of ego. I daresay that -- one way or the other -- eternity has shown him the error of his ways.
Cheers!
You're surely welcome!
Another poster here called HLM's output "boring and almost incoherent". That has not been my experience; I can't help wondering how the critic's writing compares with Mencken's.
Thanks for posting!
A true friend of liberty who was disgusted to see our Republic overrun by Quacks, Do-gooders, Socialists, and Jesus Freaks. My kind of guy?
Quotes:
[43] The effort to educate the uneducable is hopeless. Schools for
adults soon become kindergartens for adults. The pupils are quite
unable to take in the education proper to their years. The gogues thus
have to provide them with amusement, just as children of four are
provided with amusement in kindergartens. The hope is that they will
somehow learn to think as an accidental by-product of playing, but that
hope is vain.
[51] The average American college fails...to achieve its ostensible ends.
One failure...of the colleges lies in their apparent incompetence to
select and train a sufficient body of intelligent teachers. Their choice
is commonly limited to second-raters, for a man who really knows a
subject is seldom content to spend his lifetime teaching it: he wants
to function in a more active and satisfying way, as all other living
organisms want to function. There are, of course, occasional exceptions
to this rule, but they are very rare, and none of them are to be found
in the average college. The pedagogues there incarcerated are all
inferior men--men who really know very little about the things they
pretend to teach, and are too stupid or too indolent to acquire more.
Being taught by them is roughly like being dosed in illness by third-
year medical students.
The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is
and always must be...next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an
intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
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H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Cynicism]
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
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H. L. Mencken
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Laws]
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Poetry]
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Lies]
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Journalism]
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
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H. L. Mencken
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Idealism]
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
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H. L. Mencken
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
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H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
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H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Criticism] [Prejudice]
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Democracy]
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Government]
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
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H. L. Mencken
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
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H. L. Mencken
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Religion]
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.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Trust]
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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H. L. Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Government]
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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H. L. Mencken
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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H. L. Mencken
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
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H. L. Mencken
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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H. L. Mencken
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.
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H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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H. L. Mencken
- More quotations on: [Golf]
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
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H. L. Mencken
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.
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H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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H. L. Mencken
I admit that I don't know much about him either--just pithy quotes that people enjoy writing or reciting. After Pres. Bush's re-election, some Mencken fan posted a typewritten quote in the break room about being too honest to be a politician or something like that. In response, I posted Linda Eddy's Girly-man picture behind the sheet.
Solzie got to them first, but I have posted quotes in #51 as well for your perusal.
He was right about the Kaiser, who we should have backed. Unfortunatly, Anglophile Roosevelt had other ideas.
He was a LIBERTARIAN who hated Socialists, Quacks, and Jesus Freaks in equal spades.
SOooo, woodja say that bout an Ambrose Bierce fan too?????
He was right about government.
My kind of guy!!!
Far from it. I would be respectfully pleased to make the acquaintance of any fan or Mr. Bierce.
I slammed Eyes so nastily because he did not leave his reaction to Mencken at the common posture of the ignorant (they made me read it but I didn't see nothing in it). He took it to the next level and opined in #3 that Mencken was "pretty much an a-hole."
I felt, at that point, liberated from strained gentility.
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