Are there any books of his legendary quotes which include the dates he made those quotes?
I never could understand the fascination with that guy. I was forced to read some of his stuff years ago. He was pretty much an a-hole from what I could tell.
"To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, the grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will comfort me in hell."
HLM from "The Man Within"
HLM
[388] Despite all the current gabble about curved space and other such phantasms, it is much easier to think of the universe as infinite than to think of it as having metes and bounds. If we try to think of it as finite we must somehow conjure up a region of sheer nothingness beyond its limits, and that is a feat I defy anyone to undertake. The human mind, in fact, simply cannot grasp the concept of nothingness. All we know of the universe tends to prove that it is unlimited, and the more we learn about it the more that impression is confirmed. Am I here, perhaps citing a subjective reason to support an objective fact? Well, why not? What other reasons are there? We can examine the universe only through our senses, and our senses tell us that it spreads infinitely in all directions. By senses, of course, I do not mean the unaided senses of a child; I mean the enormously reinforced senses of a man of science. His telescope magnifies the evidence of his eyes, but what it tells him must still be recorded by his two optic nerves.
As for me, I refuse to waste thought upon a structure that apparently has no limits in either time or space. The human mind can imagine it, but that is as far as anyone can go. Our ordinary thinking constantly assumes temporal and spatial boundaries; indeed, we always think of objects and phenomena in terms of duration and extension. But there is no sign of either in the universe. We must either accept it as infinite, or stop thinking about it altogether. Any effort to put bounds to it, as for instance that of Einstein and his followers, leads quickly to plain absurdity. Curved space explains nothing whatsoever: it simply begs the question. Nor is there any genuine illumination in the general doctrine of relativity. It only says what every man of any sense knew before--that time and space are not absolute values, but only relative.
On the Roosevelts:
Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy - here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!
So shouldn't your headline read 50 years ago tomorrow?
People are sensitive about Mencken because he didn't exempt churchmen from his targeted hypocrites, as most wits of the time did. His observations on politicians and preachers alike hit far too close to the mark for some. ;)
Why hs is hyped so much is the mystery. HL Mencken, that iconoclastic cad, the genius at skewering social mores and hypocrosy etc...
But as I recall, when one actually reads his stuf it's boring and almost incoherent.
I think Hornbeck was a lot greater.
And Gene Kelly could dance better I'm sure.
"Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
"The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failures to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy."
Many more examples of Mencken's brilliance exist, of course. Those are just some of my favorites. I even find myself more at ease with his militant agnosticism as I age (he believed that the liberation of the human mind was best furthered by those "who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud."). Mencken was fearless -- fearless above all. And he tolerated nonsense not at all.
Thanks for the post, Borges. Here's my collection of favorite HLM quotes. Don't necessarily agree with all of them, but they're funny and "well put":
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Adultery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
I do not believe in education, and am glad I never went to a university. Beyond the rudiments, it is impossible to teach anything. All the rest the student acquires himself. His teacher merely makes it difficult for him.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
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.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another
Evil - That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it
Experience - A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
...one is always most bitter, not toward the author of one's wrongs, but toward the victim of one's wrongs.
Fine - A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his crime.
Psychology - The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.
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
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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
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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H. L. Mencken
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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H. L. Mencken
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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
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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
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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.
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My favorite cynic bump!
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
WOOHOO! Give 'em hell, H.L.!
"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace." – H. L. Mencken
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." – H L. Mencken
"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights." – H.L. Mencken