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Here Is One Of The Fundamental Defects Of American Fiction--perhaps The One Character That Sets It Off Sharply From All Other Known Kinds Of Contemporary Fiction. It Habitually Exhibits, Not A Man Of Delicate Organization In Revolt Against The Inexplicable Tragedy Of Existence, But A Man Of Low Sensibilities And Elemental Desires Yielding Himself Gladly To His Environment, And So Achieving What, Under A Third-rate Civilization, Passes For Success. To Get On: This Is The Aim. To Weigh And Reflect, To Doubt And Rebel: This Is The Thing To Be Avoided.

-H. L. Mencken

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Here Is One Of

H. L. Mencken

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Here Is One Of The Fundamental Defects Of American Fiction--perhaps The One Character That Sets It Off Sharply From All Other Known Kinds Of Contemporary Fiction. It Habitually Exhibits, Not A Man Of Delicate Organization In Revolt Against The Inexplicable Tragedy Of Existence, But A Man Of Low Sensibilities And Elemental Desires Yielding Himself Gladly To His Environment, And So Achieving What, Under A Third-rate Civilization, Passes For Success. To Get On: This Is The Aim. To Weigh And Reflect, To Doubt And Rebel: This Is The Thing To Be Avoided.

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Contemporary Fiction

More From H. L. Mencken

All Of The American's Foreign Wars Have Been Fought With Foes Either Too Weak To Resist Them Or Too Heavily Engaged Elsewhere To Make More Than A Half-hearted Attempt. The Combats With Mexico And Spain Were Not Wars; They Were Simply Lynchings.

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.

Mutual Interest

Wealth - Any Income That Is At Least One Hundred Dollars More A Year Than The Income Of One's Wife's Sister's Husband.

To The Best Of My Knowledge And Belief, The Average American Newspaper, Even Of The So-called Better Sort, Is Not Only Quite As Bad As Upton Sinclair Says It Is, But 10 Times Worse, 10 Times As Ignorant, 10 Times As Unfair And Tyrannical, 10 Times As Complaisant And Pusillanimous, And 10 Times As Devious, Hypocritical, Disingenuous, Deceitful, Pharisaical, Pecksniffian, Fraudulent, Slippery, Unscrupulous, Perfidious, Lewd And Dishonest.

Love Is Photogenic. It Needs Darkness Room To Develop

Whenever "a" Attempts By Law To Impose His Moral Standards Upon "b," "a" Is Most Likely A Scoundrel.

Government Is Actually The Worst Failure Of Civilized Man. There Has Never Been A Really Good One, And Even Those That Are Most Tolerable Are Arbitrary, Cruel, Grasping And Unintelligent.

There Is Only One Honest Impulse At The Bottom Of Puritanism, And That Is The Impulse To Punish The Man With A Superior Capacity For Happiness.

Civilization, In Fact, Grows More Maudlin And Hysterical; Especially Under Democracy It Tends To Degenerate Into A Mere Combat Of Crazes; 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. Wars Are No Longer Waged By The Will Of Superior Men, Capable Of Judging Dispassionately And Intelligently The Causes Behind Them And The Effects Flowing Out Of Them. The Are Now Begun By First Throwing A Mob Into A Panic; They Are Ended Only When It Has Spent Its Ferine Fury.

If Experience Teaches Us Anything At All, It Teaches Us This: That A Good Politician, Under Democracy, Is Quite As Unthinkable As An Honest Burglar.

The Average Man's Love Of Liberty Is Nine-tenths Imaginary, Exactly Like His Love Of Sense, Justice And Truth... It Takes A Special Sort Of Man To Understand And Enjoy Liberty - And He Is Usually An Outlaw In Democratic Societies.

The Most Dangerous Man To Any Government Is The Man Who Is Able To Think Things Out For Himself.

The Natural Tendency Of Every Government Is To Grow Steadily Worse-that Is, To Grow More Satisfactory To Those Who Constitute It And Less Satisfactory To Those Who Support It.

In War The Heroes Always Outnumber The Soldiers Ten To One.

In Baltimore, Soft Crabs Are Always Fried (or Broiled) In The Altogether, With Maybe A Small Jock-strap Of Bacon Added.

If There Was Ever A Dissenter From The National Optimismit Was Surely Edgar Allan Poe--without Question The Bravest And Mostoriginal, If Perhaps Also The Least Orderly And Judicious, Of All The Critics That We Have Produced.

The Typical American Of Today Has Lost All The Love Of Liberty, That His Forefathers Had, And All Their Disgust Of Emotion, And Pride In Self- Reliance. He Is Led No Longer By Davy Crocketts; He Is Led By Cheer Leaders, Press Agents, Word Mongers, Uplifters.

As If Paralyzed By The National Fear Of Ideas, The Democratic Distrust Of Whatever Strikes Beneath The Prevailing Platitudes, It Evades All Resolute And Honest Dealing With What, After All, Must Be Every Healthy Literature's Elementary Materials.

I Believe In Only One Thing And That Thing Is Human Liberty.

When Somebody Says It’s Not About The Money, It’s About The Money.

The Capacity Of Human Beings To Bore One Another Seems To Be Vastly Greater Than That Of Any Other Animal. Some Of Their Most Esteemed Inventions Have No Other Apparent Purpose - For Example, The Dinner Party Of More Than Two, The Epic Poem, And The Science Of Metaphysics.

The Art Of Politics, Under Democracy, Is Simply The Art Of Ringing It. Two Branches Reveal Themselves. There Is The Art Of The Demagogue, And There Is The Art Of What May Be Called, By A Shot-gun Marriage Of Latin And Greek, The Demaslave. They Are Complementary, And Both Of Them Are Degrading To Their Practitioners. The Demagogue Is One Who Preaches Doctrines He Knows To Be Untrue To Men He Knows To Be Idiots. The Demaslave Is One Who Listens To What These Idiots Have To Say And Then Pretends That He Believes It Himself.

Liberty Is Not For These Slaves; I Do Not Advocate Inflicting It Against Their Conscience. On The Contrary, I Am Strongly In Favor Of Letting Them Crawl And Grovel All They Please Before Whatever Fraud Or Combination Of Frauds They Choose To Venerate...our Whole Practical Government Is Grounded In Mob Psychology And The Boobus Americanus Will Follow Any Command That Promises To Make Him Safer.

Penetrating So Many Secrets, We Cease To Believe In The Unknowable. But There It Sits Nevertheless, Calmly Licking Its Chops

The One Permanent Emotion Of The Inferior Man Is Fear - Fear Of The Unknown, The Complex, The Inexplicable. What He Wants Above Everything Else Is Safety.

The Net Effect Of Clarence Darrow's Great Speech Yesterday Seemed To Be Precisely The Same As If He Had Bawled It Up A Rainspout In The Interior Of Afghanistan.

To Wage A War For A Purely Moral Reason Is As Absurd As To Ravish A Woman For A Purely Moral Reason

Why Assume So Glibly That The God Who Presumably Created The Universe Is Still Running It? It Is Certainly Conceivable That He May Have Finished It And Then Turned It Over To Lesser Gods To Operate.

Our Literature, Despite Several False Starts That Promised Much, Is Chiefly Remarkable, Now As Always, For Its Respectable Mediocrity.

This Passion, So Unordered And Yet So Potent, Explains The Capacity For Teaching That One Frequently Observes In Scientific Men Of High Attainments In Their Specialties-for Example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted And Osler-men Who Knew Nothing Whatever About The So-called Science Of Pedagogy, And Would Have Derided Its Alleged Principles If They Had Heard Them Stated.

No Matter How Long He Lives, No Man Ever Becomes As Wise As The Average Woman Of Forty-eight.

[government] Is Apprehended, Not As A Committee Of Citizens Chosen To Carry On The Communal Business Of The Whole Population, But As A Separate And Autonomous Corporation, Mainly Devoted To Exploiting The Population For The Benefit Of Its Own Members.

American Journalism (like The Journalism Of Any Other Country) Is Predominantly Paltry And Worthless. Its Pretensions Are Enormous, But Its Achievements Are Insignificant.

The Demagogue Is One Who Preaches Doctrines He Knows To Be Untrue To Men He Knows To Be Idiots.

During Many A Single Week, I Daresay, More Money Is Spent In New York Upon Useless And Evil Things Than Would Suffice To Run The Kingdom Of Denmark For A Year.

That It Should Still Be Necessary, At This Late Stage In The Senility Of The Human Race To Argue That Women Have A Fine And Fluent Intelligence Is Surely An Eloquent Proof Of The Defective Observation, Incurable Prejudice, And General Imbecility Of Their Lords And Masters.

The Military Caste Did Not Originate As A Party Of Patriots, But As A Party Of Bandits

It Is The Natural Tendency Of The Ignorant To Believe What Is Not True. In Order To Overcome That Tendency It Is Not Sufficient To Exhibit The True; It Is Also Necessary To Expose And Denounce The False.

The Average Man Does Not Get Pleasure Out Of An Idea Because He Thinks It Is True; He Thinks It Is True Because He Gets Pleasure Out Of It.

Man Is A Natural Polygamist: He Always Has One Woman Leading Him By The Nose, And Another Hanging On To His Coattails.

I Give You Chicago. It Is Not London And Harvard. It Is Not Paris And Buttermilk. It Is American In Every Chitling And Sparerib. It Is Alive From Snout To Tail.

I Have Little Belief In Human Progress. The Human Race Is Incurably Idiotic. It Will Never Be Happy.

The Extortions And Oppressions Of Government Will Go On So Long As Such Bare Fraudulence Deceives And Disarms The Victims; So Long As They Are Ready To Swallow The Immemorial Official Theory That Protesting Against The Stealings Of The Archbishop's Secretary's Nephew's Mistress' Illegitimate Son Is A Sin Against The Holy Ghost.

Bridges Would Not Be Safer If Only People Who Knew The Proper Definition Of A Real Number Were Allowed To Design Them.

Law And Its Instrument, Government, Are Necessary To The Peace And Safety Of All Of Us, But All Of Us, Unless We Live The Lives Of Mud Turtles, Frequently Find Them Arrayed Against Us.

It Is The Theory Of All Modern Civilized Governments That They Protect And Foster The Liberty Of The Citizen; It Is The Practice Of All Of Them To Limit Its Exercise, And Sometimes Very Narrowly.

War Will Never Cease Until Babies Begin To Come Into The World With Larger Cerebrums And Smaller Adrenal Glands.

The Truth Is . . . That The Great Artists Of The World Are Never Puritans, And Seldom Ever Ordinarily Respectable. No Virtuous Man - That Is, Virtuous In The Ymca Sense - Has Ever Painted A Picture Worth Looking At, Or Written A Symphony Worth Hearing, Or A Book Worth Reading, And It Is Highly Improbable That The Thing Has Ever Been Done By A Virtuous Woman.

The Two Main Ideas That Run Through All Of My Writing, Whether It Be Literary Criticism Or Political Polemic Are These: I Am Strong In Favor Of Liberty And I Hate Fraud.

The Jews Fastened Their Religion Upon The Western World, Not Because It Was More Reasonable Than The Religions Of Their Contemporaries - As A Matter Of Fact, It Was Vastly Less Reasonable Than Many Of Them - But Because It Was Far More Poetical.

An Author, Like Any Other So-called Artist, Is A Man In Whom The Normal Vanity Of All Men Is So Vastly Exaggerated That He Finds It A Sheer Impossibility To Hold It In. His Over-powering Impulse Is To Gyrate Before His Fellow Men, Flapping His Wings And Emitting Defiant Yells. This Being Forbidden By The Police Of All Civilized Nations, He Takes It Out By Putting His Yells On Paper. Such Is The Thing Called Self-expression.

What Ass First Let Loose The Doctrine That The Suffrage Is A High Boon And Voting A Noble Privilege?

All Talk Of Winning The People By Appealing To Their Intelligence, Of Conquering Them By Impeccable Syllogism, Is So Much Moonshine.

The Believing Mind Reaches Its Perihelion In The So-called Liberals. They Believe In Each And Every Quack Who Sets Up His Booth Inthe Fairgrounds, Including The Communists. The Communists Have Some Talents Too, But They Always Fall Short Of Believing In The Liberals.

I Believe That All Government Is Evil, In That All Government Must Necessarily Make War On Liberty, And That The Democratic Government Is At Least As Bad As Any Of The Other Forms.

Anyhow, The Hole In The Donut Is At Least Digestible.

No One In This World, So Far As I Know--and I Have Searched The Records For Years, And Employed Agents To Help Me--has Ever Lost Money By Underestimating The Intelligence Of The Great Masses Of The Plain People. Nor Has Any One Ever Lost Public Office Thereby. The Mistake That Is Made Always Runs The Other Way. Because The Plain People Are Able To Speak And Understand, And Even, In Many Cases, To Read And Write, It Is Assumed That They Have Ideas In Their Heads, And An Appetite For More. This Assumption Is Folly. They Dislike Ideas, For Ideas Make Them Uncomfortable.

No Romantic Novel Ever Written In America, By Man Or Woman, Is One Half So Beautiful As My Ántonia.

Never Argue With A Man Whose Job Depends On Not Being Convinced.

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.

It Is Not Materialism That Is The Chief Curse Of The World, As Pastors Teach, But Idealism. Men Get Into Trouble By Taking Their Visions And Hallucinations Too Seriously.

The Average Schoolmaster Is And Always Must Be Essentially An Ass, For How Can One Imagine An Intelligent Man Engaging In So Puerile An Avocation.

No Married Woman Ever Trusts Her Husband Absolutely, Nor Does She Ever Act As If She Did Trust Him. Her Utmost Confidence Is As Wary As An American Pickpocket's Confidence That The Policeman On The Beat Will Stay Bought.

The Worst Government Is Often The Most Moral. One Composed Of Cynics Is Often Very Tolerant And Humane. But When Fanatics Are On Top There Is No Limit To Oppression.

A Woman Usually Respects Her Father, But Her View Of Her Husband Is Mingled With Contempt, For She Is Of Course Privy To The Transparent Devices By Which She Snared Him.

I Believe In Only One Thing And That Thing Is Human Liberty. If Ever A Man Is To Achieve Anything Like Dignity, It Can Happen Only If Superior Men Are Given Absolute Freedom To Think What They Want To Think And Say What They Want To Say. I Am Against Any Man And Any Organization Which Seeks To Limit Or Deny That Freedom ... The Superior Man Can Be Sure Of Freedom Only If It Is Given To All Men.

On The One Hand, We May Tell The Truth, Regardless Of Consequences, And On The Other Hand We May Mellow It And Sophisticate It To Make It Humane And Tolerable.

Telling The Truth

The Common Notion That Free Speech Prevails In The United States Always Makes Me Laugh.

It Is Impossible To Imagine Goethe Or Beethoven Being Good At Billiards Or Golf.

I Hate All Sports As Rabidly As A Person Who Likes Sports Hates Common Sense.

Popularity--the Capacity For Listening Sympathetically When Men Boast Of Their Wives And Women Complain Of Their Husbands.

I Know Of No Existing Nation That Deserves To Live, And I Know Of Very Few Individuals.

There Is, It Appears, A Conspiracy Of Scientists Afoot. Their Purpose Is To Break Down Religion, Propagate Immorality, And So Reduce Mankind To The Level Of Brutes. They Are The Sworn And Sinister Agents Of Beelzebub, Who Yearns To Conquer The World, And Has His Eye Especially Upon Tennessee.]

Conquer The World

To Believe That Russia Has Got Rid Of The Evils Of Capitalism Takes A Special Kind Of Mind. It Is The Same Kind Of Mind That Believes That A Holy Roller Has Got Rid Of Sin.

It Seems To Me That Society Usually Wins. There Are, To Be Sure, Free Spirits In The World, But Their Freedom, In The Last Analysis, Is Not Much Greater Than That Of A Canary In A Cage. They May Leap From Perch To Perch; They May Bathe And Guzzle At Their Will; They May Flap Their Wings And Sing. But They Are Still In The Cage, And Soon Or Late It Conquers Them.

A Woman Wishes To Mother A Man Simply Because She Sees Into His Helplessness, His Need Of An Amiable Environment, His Touching Self-delusion.

Only To Often On Meeting Scientific Men, Even Those Of Genuine Distiction, One Finds That They Are Dull Fellows And Very Stupid. They Know One Thing To Excess; They Know Nothing Else. Pursuing Facts Too Doggedly And Unimaginatively, They Miss All The Charming Things That Are Not Facts. ... Too Much Learning, Like Too Little Learning, Is An Unpleasant And Dangerous Thing.

Let's Not Burn The Universities Yet. After All, The Damage They Do Might Be Worse.

Sin Is A Dangerous Toy In The Hands Of The Virtuous. It Should Be Left To The Congenitally Sinful, Who Know When To Play With It And When To Let It Alone.

Hope: A Pathological Belief In The Occurrence Of The Impossible.

The First Kiss Is Stolen By The Man; The Last Is Begged By The Woman.

The Chief Business Of The Nation, As A Nation, Is The Setting Up Of Heroes, Mainly Bogus.

But I Wonder Where We Will Land If Trial Judges Begin Deciding That The Fact That A Man Has Committed An Atrocious Crime Is Proof Sufficient That He Is Not Responsible For His Acts.

By Profession A Biologist, [thomas Henry Huxley] Covered In Fact The Whole Field Of The Exact Sciences, And Then Bulged Through Its Four Fences. Absolutely Nothing Was Uninteresting To Him. His Curiosity Ranged From Music To Theology And From Philosophy To History. He Didn't Simply Know Something About Everything; He Knew A Great Deal About Everything.

There Are Some People Who Read Too Much: The Bibliobibuli.

At A Time When The Respectable Bourgeois Youngsters Of My Generation Were College Freshmen, Oppressed By Simian Sophomores And Affronted With Balderdash Daily And Hourly By Chalky Pedagogues, I Was At Large In A Wicked Seaport Of Half A Million People, With A Front Seat At Every Public Show, As Free Of The Night As Of Day, And Getting Earfuls Of Instruction In A Hundred Giddy Arcana, None Of Them Taught In Schools.... [but] If I Neglected The Humanities, I Was Meanwhile Laying In All The Worldly Wisdom Of A Police Lieutenant, A Bartender, A Shyster Lawyer, Or A Midwife.

I Never Agree With Communists Or Any Other Kind Of Kept Men.

The More I Think You Over, The More It Comes Home To Me What An Unmitigated Middle Victorian Ass You Are!

The Highfalutin Aims Of Democracy, Whether Real Or Imaginary, Are Always Assumed To Be Identical With Its Achievements. This, Of Course, Is Sheer Hallucination. Not One Of Those Aims, Not Even The Aim Of Giving Every Adult A Vote, Has Been Realized. It Has No More Made Men Wise And Free Than Christianity Has Made Them Good.

The War On Privilege Will Never End. Its Next Grat Campaign Will Be Against The Special Privileges Of The Underprivileged.

Man, Without A Saving Touch Of Woman In Him, Is Too Doltish, Too Naive And Romantic, Too Easily Deluded And Lulled To Sleep By His Imagination To Be Anything Above A Cavalryman, A Theologian Or A Corporation Director.

Creator: A Comedian Whose Audience Is Afraid To Laugh.

It Doesn't Take A Majority To Make A Rebellion; It Takes Only A Few Determined Leaders And A Sound Cause.

Hygiene Is The Corruption Of Medicine By Morality.

No Article Of Faith Is Proof Against The Disintegrating Effects Of Increasing Information; One Might Almost Describe The Acquirement Of Knowledge As A Process Of Disillusion.

What Are The Characters That I Discern Most Clearly In The So-called Anglo-saxon Type Of Man? I May Answer At Once That Two Stickout Above All Others. One Is His Curious And Apparently Incurable Incompetence--his Congenital Inability To Do Any Difficult Thing Easily And Well, Whether It Be Isolating A Bacillus Or Writing A Sonata. The Other Is His Astounding Susceptibility To Fears And Alarms--in Short, His Hereditary Cowardice.... There Is No Record In History Of Any Anglo-saxon Nation Entering Upon Any Great War Without Allies.

Unsuccessful Candidates For The Presidency Should Be Quietly Hanged As A Matter Of Public Sanitation And Decorum.

It Is The Mission Of The Pedagogue, Not To Make His Pupils Think, But To Make Them Think Right, And The More Nearly His Own Mind Pulsates With The Great Ebbs And Flows Of Popular Delusion And Emotion, The More Admirably He Performs His Function. He May Be An Ass, But That Is Surely No Demerit In A Man Paid To Make Asses Of His Customers.

A Sound American Is Simply One Who Has Put Out Of His Mind All Doubts And Questionings, And Who Accepts Instantly, And As Incontrovertible Gospel, The Whole Body Of Official Doctrine Of His Day, Whatever It May Be And No Matter How Often It May Change. The Instant He Challenges It, No Matter How Timorously And Academically, He Ceases By That Much To Be A Loyal And Creditable Citizen Of The Republic.

I'm Ombibulous. I Drink Every Known Alcoholic Drink And Enjoy Them All.

The Fact That A Human Brain Of High Amperage, Otherwise Highly Efficient, May Have A Hole In It Is Surely Not A Secret.

Moral Certainty Is Always A Sign Of Cultural Inferiority. The More Uncivilized The Man, The Surer He Is That He Knows Precisely What Is Right And What Is Wrong.

If A Politician Found He Had Cannibals Among His Constituents, He Would Promise Them Missionaries For Dinner.

Congress Consists Of One-third, More Or Less, Scoundrels; Two-thirds, More Or Less, Idiots; And Three-thirds, More Or Less, Poltroons.

A Man's Women Folk, Whatever Their Outward Show Of Respect For His Merit And Authority, Always Regard Him Secretly As An Ass, And With Something Akin To Pity.

The Intelligent, Like The Unintelligent, Are Responsive To Propaganda.

Philadelphia Is The Most Pecksniffian Of American Cities, And Thus Probably Leads The World.

I'm Thoroughly Convinced That Editors Don't Help Authors.

Suicide Is A Belated Acquiescence In The Opinion Of One's Wife's Relatives.

At The End Of One Millennium And Nine Centuries Of Christianity, It Remains An Unshakable Assumption Of The Law In All Christian Countries And Of The Moral Judgement Of Christians Everywhere That If A Man And A Woman, Entering A Room Together, Close The Door Behind Them, The Man Will Come Out Sadder And The Woman Wiser.

It Seems To Me That A Great University Ought To Have Room In It For Men Subscribing To Every Sort Of Idea That Is Currently Prevalent

We Have Had More Brilliant Presidents Than Cleveland, And One Or Two Who Were Considerably More Profound, But We Have Never Had One, At Least Since Washington, Whose Fundamental Character Was Solider And More Admirable.

We Suffer Most When The White House Busts With Ideas.

A Poet More Than Thirty Years Old Is Simply An Overgrown Child.

There Are Two Impossibilities In Life: "just One Drink" And "an Honest Politician."

If, After I Depart This Vale, You Ever Remember Me And Have Thought To Please My Ghost, Forgive Some Sinner And Wink Your Eye At Some Homely Girl.

Writing Does For Me What Giving Milk Does For A Cow.

It Costs More To Maintain Ten Vices Than One Virtue.

America's Biggest Failure Is Its Inability To Take Comedy Seriously.

The Best Years Are The Forties; After Fifty A Man Begins To Deteriorate, But In The Forties He Is At The Maximum Of His Villainy.

The Intellectual Heritage Of The Race Belongs To The Minority.

The Christian Always Swears A Bloody Oath That He Will Never Do It Again. The Civilized Man Simply Resolves To Be A Bit More Careful Next Time.

Here Is One Of The Fundamental Defects Of American Fiction--perhaps The One Character That Sets It Off Sharply From All Other Known Kinds Of Contemporary Fiction. It Habitually Exhibits, Not A Man Of Delicate Organization In Revolt Against The Inexplicable Tragedy Of Existence, But A Man Of Low Sensibilities And Elemental Desires Yielding Himself Gladly To His Environment, And So Achieving What, Under A Third-rate Civilization, Passes For Success. To Get On: This Is The Aim. To Weigh And Reflect, To Doubt And Rebel: This Is The Thing To Be Avoided.

Contemporary Fiction

It Is My Conviction That No Normal Man Ever Fell In Love, Within The Ordinary Meaning Of The Term, After The Age Of Thirty.

Next To The Semi-colon, Quotation Marks Seem To Be The Chief Butts Of Reformatory Ardor.

Quotation Marks

It Is Difficult To Imagine Anyone Having Any Real Hopes For The Human Race In The Face Of The Fact That The Great Majority Of Men Still Believe That The Universe Is Run By A Gaseous Vertebrate Of Astronomical Heft And Girth, Who Is Nevertheless Interested In The Minutest Details Of The Private Conduct Of Even The Meanest Man.

The American People, I Am Convinced, Really Detest Free Speech. At The Slightest Alarm They Are Ready And Eager To Put It Down.

The Truth Is That The Scientific Value Of Polar Exploration Is Greatly Exaggerated. The Thing That Takes Men On Such Hazardous Trips Is Really Not Any Thirst For Knowledge, But Simply A Yearning For Adventure. ... A Polar Explorer Always Talks Grandly Of Sacrificing His Fingers And Toes To Science. It Is An Amiable Pretention, But There Is No Need To Take It Seriously.

I Know Of No American Who Starts From A Higher Level Of Aspiration Than The Journalist. . . . He Plans To Be Both An Artist And A Moralist -- A Master Of Lovely Words And Merchant Of Sound Ideas. He Ends, Commonly, As The Most Depressing Jackass Of His Community -- That Is, If His Career Goes On To What Is Called A Success.

Strike An Average Between What A Woman Thinks Of Her Husband A Month Before She Marries Him And What She Thinks Of Him A Year Afterward, And You Will Have The Truth About Him.

The Value The World Sets Upon Motives Is Often Grossly Unjust And Inaccurate.

Voting Is Simply A Way Of Determining Which Side Is The Stronger Without Putting It To The Test Of Fighting.

The Scientist Who Yields Anything To Theology, However Slight, Is Yielding To Ignorance And False Pretenses, And As Certainly As If He Granted That A Horse-hair Put Into A Bottle Of Water Will Turn Into A Snake.

The Priest, Realistically Considered, Is The Most Immoral Of Men, For He Is Always Willing To Sacrifice Every Other Sort Of Good To The One Good Of His Arcanum - The Vague Body Of Mysteries That He Calls The Truth.

Whenever A Husband And Wife Begin To Discuss Their Marriage They Are Giving Evidence At A Coroner's Inquest.

Our Whole Practical Government Is Grounded In Mob Psychology And The Boobus Americanus Will Follow Any Command That Promises To Make Him Safer.

Of All Forms Of Visible Otherworldliness, It Seems To Me, The Gothic Is At Once The Most Logical And The Most Beautiful. It Reaches Up Magnificently-and A Good Half Of It Is Palpably Useless.

Human Progress Is Furthered, Not By Conformity, But By Aberration.

[government's] Great Contribution To Human Wisdom...is The Discovery That The Taxpayer Has More Than One Pocket.

I Think The Negro People Should Feel Secure Enough By Now To Face A Reasonable Ridicule Without Terror. I Am Unalterably Opposed To All Efforts To Put Down Free Speech, Whatever The Excuse.

Whenever I Write Anything That Sets Up Controversy Its Meaning Is Distorted Almost Instantly. Even The Editorial Writers Of Newspapers Seem To Be Unable To Understand The Plainest Sentence.

The Opera Is To Music What A Bawdy House Is To A Cathedral.

Writing Books Is Certainly A Most Unpleasant Occupation. It Is Lonesome, Unsanitary, And Maddening. Many Authors Go Crazy.

Nature Abhors A Moron.

Osteopath--one Who Argues That All Human Ills Are Caused By The Pressure Of Hard Bone Upon Soft Tissue. The Proof Of His Theory Isto Be Found In The Heads Of Those Who Believe It.

Platitude: An Idea (a) That Is Admitted To Be True By Everyone, And (b) That Is Not True.

For It Is An Absurdity To Call A Country Civilized In Which A Decent And Industrious Man, Laboriously Mastering A Trade Which Is Valuble And Necessary To The Common Weal, Has No Assurance That It Will Sustain Him While He Stands Ready To Practice It, Or Keep Him Out Of The Poorhouse When Illness Or Age Makes Him Idle.

The Only Way For A Reporter To Look At A Politician Is Down.

If What I May Believe - About Gall-stones, The Constitution, Castor Oil, Or God - Is Conditioned By Law, Then I Am Not A Free Man.

You Never Push A Noun Against A Verb Without Trying To Blow Up Something.

The Artist Is Not A Reporter, But A Great Teacher. It Is Not His Business To Depict The World As It Is, But As It Ought To Be.

The Whole Drift Of Our Law Is Toward The Absolute Prohibition Of All Ideas That Diverge In The Slightest Form From The Accepted Platitudes, And Behind That Drift Of Law There Is A Far More Potent Force Of Growing Custom, And Under That Custom There Is A Natural Philosophy Which Erects Conformity Into The Noblest Of Virtues And The Free Functioning Of Personality Into A Capital Crime Against Society.

The Fundamental Trouble With Marriage Is That It Shakes A Man's Confidence In Himself, And So Greatly Diminishes His General Competence And Effectiveness. His Habit Of Mind Becomes That Of A Commander Who Has Lost A Decisive And Calamitous Battle. He Quite Trusts Himself Thereafter.

The Only Really Happy Folk Are Married Women And Single Men.

Man Is A Beautiful Machine That Works Very Badly.

Immortality Is The Condition Of A Dead Man Who Doesn't Believe He Is Dead

The Trouble With Communism Is The Communists, Just As The Trouble With Christianity Is The Christians.

Psychotherapy Is The Theory That The Patient Will Probably Get Well Anyhow And Is Certainly A Damn Fool.

The Function Of A Newspaper In A Democracy Is To Stand As A Sort Of Chronic Opposition To The Reigning Quacks. The Minute It Begins To Out-whoop Them It Forfeits Its Character And Becomes Ridiculous.

The Average Woman Must Inevitably View Her Actual Husband With A Certain Disdain; He Is Anything But Her Ideal. In Consequence, She Cannot Help Feeling That Her Children Are Cruelly Handicapped By The Fact That He Is Their Father.

Socialist: A Man Suffering From An Overwhelming Conviction To Believe What Is Not True.

No Form Of Liberty Is Worth A Darn [sic] Which Doesn't Give Us The Right To Do Wrong Now And Then.

[a Formula For Answering Controversial Letters -- Without Even Reading The Letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You May Be Right.

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.

The Essential Dilemma Of Education Is To Be Found In The Fact That The Sort Of Man (or Woman) Who Knows A Given Subject Sufficiently Well To Teach It Is Usually Unwilling To Do So.

Sometimes The Idiots Outvote The Sensible People.

The True Bureaucrat Is A Man Of Really Remarkable Talents. He Writes A Kind Of English That Is Unknown Elsewhere In The World, And An Almost Infinite Capacity For Forming Complicated And Unworkable Rules.

Nine Out Of Ten Americans Are Actually Monarchists At Bottom. The Fact Is Proved By Their High Suseptibility To Political Claims By President's Sons And Other Relatives, Usually Nonentities.

The Only Really Respectable Protestants Are The Fundamentalists. Unfortunately, They Are Also Palpable Idiots.

The Critic, To Interpret His Artist, Even To Understand His Artist, Must Be Able To Get Into The Mind Of His Artist; He Must Feel And Comprehend The Vast Pressure Of The Creative Passion.

The Notion That Anything Is Gained By Fixing A Language In A Groove Is Cherished Only By Pedants.

Poetry Has Done Enough When It Charms, But Prose Must Also Convince.

Hygiene Is The Corruption Of Medicine By Morality. It Is Impossible To Find A Hygienist Who Does Not Debase His Theory Of The Healthful With A Theory Of The Virtuous. ... The Aim Of Medicine Is Surely Not To Make Men Virtuous; It Is To Safeguard Them From The Consequences Of Their Vices.

Criticism Is Prejudice Made Plausible.

A Gentlemen Is One Who Never Strikes A Woman Without Provocation.

The Motive Of Fear Is The Be-all And End-all Of Religion.

To Be Happy One Must Be (a) Well Fed, Unhounded By Sordid Cares, At Ease In Zion, (b) Full Of A Comfortable Feeling Of Superiority To The Masses Of One's Fellow Men, And (c) Delicately And Unceasingly Amused According To One's Taste. It Is My Contention That, If This Definition Be Accepted, There Is No Country In The World Wherein A Man Constituted As I Am - A Man Of My Peculiar Weakness, Vanities, Appetites, And Aversions - Can Be So Happy As He Can Be In The United States.

The Worst Of Marriage Is That It Makes A Woman Believe That All Men Are Just As Easy To Fool.

Mankind Has Failed Miserably In Its Effort To Devise A Rational System Of Government. [...] The Art Of Government Is The Exclusive Possession Of Quacks And Frauds. It Has Been So Since The Earliest Days, And It Will Probably Remain So Until The End Of Time.

There's No Underestimating The Intelligence Of The American Public.

The Art Of Writing, Like The Art Of Love, Runs All The Way From A Kind Of Routine Hard To Distinguish From Piling Bricks To A Kind Of Frenzy Closely Related To Delirium Tremens.

A Mood Of Constructive Criticism Being Upon Me, I Propose Forthwith That The Method Of Choosing Legislators Now Prevailing In The United States Be Abandoned And That The Method Used In Choosing Juries Be Substituted. That Is To Say, I Propose That The Men Who Make Our Laws Be Chosen By Chance And Against Will Of All The Rest Of Us, As Now.

I Am Never Much Interested In The Effects Of What I Write....i Seldom Read With Any Attention The Reviews Of My...books. Two Times Out Of Three I Know Something About The Reviewer, And In Very Few Cases Have I Any Respect For His Judgments. Thus His Praise, If He Praises Me, Leaves Me Unmoved. I Can't Recall Any Review That Has Even Influenced Me In The Slightest. I Live In Sort Of A Vacuum, And I Suspect That Most Other Writers Do, Too. It Is Hard To Imagine One Of The Great Ones Paying Any Serious Attention To Contemporary Opinion.

All Government Is, In Its Essence, Organized Exploitation, And In Virtually All Of Its Existing Forms It Is The Implacable Enemy Of Every Industrious And Well-disposed Man.

Government, In Its Very Essence, Is Opposed To All Increase In Knowledge. Its Tendency Is Always Towards Permanence And Against Change...[t]he Progress Of Humanity, Far From Being The Result Of Government, Has Been Made Entirely Without Its Aid And In The Face If Its Constant And Bitter Opposition.

The American People, Taking One With Another, Constitute The Most Timorous, Snivelling, Poltroonish, Ignominious Mob Of Serfs And Goosesteppers Ever Gathered Under One Flag In Christendom Since The End Of The Middle Ages.

There Is No Record In The History Of A Nation That Ever Gained Anything Valuable By Being Unable To Defend Itself.

One Smart Reader Is Worth A Thousand Boneheads.

Why Writers Write I Do Not Know. As Well Ask Why A Hen Lays An Egg Or Why A Cow Stands Patiently While An Underprivileged Farmer Burglarizes Her.

The Gettysburg Adress Has Been Included, Of Late, In Several Anthologies Of Poetry. It Actually Meets The Major Requirement Of All Poetry: It Is A Mellifluous And Emotional Statement Of The Obviously Not True. The Men Who Fought For Self-determination At Gettysburg Were Not The Federals But The Confederates.

Whenever A Annoys Or Injures B On The Pretense Of Saving Or Improving X, A Is A Scoundrel.

The Urge To Save Humanity Is Almost Always A False Front For The Urge To Rule.

It Was Morality That Burned The Books Of The Ancient Sages, And Morality That Halted The Free Inquiry Of The Golden Age And Substituted For It The Credulous Imbecility Of The Age Of Faith. It Was A Fixed Moral Code And A Fixed Theology Which Robbed The Human Race Of A Thousand Years By Wasting Them Upon Alchemy, Heretic-burning , Witchcraft And Sacerdotalism.

Temptation Is An Irresistible Force At Work On A Movable Body.

School Teachers, Taking Them By And Large, Are Probably The Most Ignorant And Stupid Class Of Men In The Whole Group Of Mental Workers.

The Only Time You Have A Free Press Is When You Own One.

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.

The Dying Man Doesn't Struggle Much And He Isn't Much Afraid. As His Alkalies Give Out He Succumbs To A Blest Stupidity. His Mindfogs. His Will Power Vanishes. He Submits Decently. He Scarcely Gives A Damn.

It Is More Blessed To Give Than Receive; For Example, Wedding Presents.

Dachshund: A Half-a-dog High And A Dog-and-a-half Long.

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