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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.

-H. L. Mencken

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The Highfalutin Aims Of

H. L. Mencken

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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.

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Every Man Is His Own Hell.

Whatever The Label On The Parties, Or The War Cries Issuing From The Demagogues Who Lead Them, The Practical Choice Is Between The Plutocracy On The One Side And A Rabble Of Preposterous Impossibilists On The Other.

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

Democracy Is A Pathetic Belief In The Collective Wisdom Of Individual Ignorance.

The World Always Makes The Assumption That The Exposure Of An Error Is Identical With The Discovery Of Truth - That Error And Truth Are Simply Opposite. They Are Nothing Of The Sort. What The World Turns To, When It Has Been Cured Of One Error, Is Usually Simply Another Error, And Maybe One Worse Than The First One.

Change Is Not Progress.

The Only Way That A Government Can Provide For Jobs For All Citizens Is By Deciding What Every Man Should Do.

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.

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.

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

Have You Ever Watched A Crab On The Shore Crawling Backward In Search Of The Atlantic Ocean, And Missing? That's The Way The Mind Of Man Operates.

The More Noisy Negro Leaders, By Depicting All Whites As Natural And Implacable Enemies To Their Race, Have Done It A Great Disservice. Large Numbers Of Whites Who Were Formerly Very Friendly To It, And Willing To Go To Great Lengths To Help It, Are Now Resentful And Suspicious.

The Catholic Clergy Seldom Bother To Make Their Arguments Plausible; It Is Plain That They Have Little Respect For Human Intelligence, And Indeed Little Belief In Its Existence.

Who Will Argue That 98.6 Farenheit Is The Right Temperature For Man? As For Me, I Decline To Do It. It May Be That We Are All Actually Freezing Hence The Pervading Stupidity Of Mankind. At 110 Or 115 Degrees Even Archbishops Might Be Intelligent.

The Most Disgusting Cad In The World Is The Man Who On The Grounds Of Decorum And Morality Avoids The Game Of Love. He Is One Who Puts His Own Ease And Security Above The Most Laudable Of Philanthropies.

The Common Man Knows Exactly What He Wants...and Deserves To Get It Good And Hard.

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.

[thomas Henry] Huxley, I Believe, Was The Greatest Englishman Of The Nineteenth Century—perhaps The Greatest Englishman Of All Time. When One Thinks Of Him, One Thinks Inevitably Of Such Men As Goethe And Aristotle. For In Him There Was That Rich, Incomparable Blend Of Intelligence And Character, Of Colossal Knowledge And High Adventurousness, Of Instinctive Honesty And Indomitable Courage Which Appears In Mankind Only Once In A Blue Moon. There Have Been Far Greater Scientists, Even In England, But There Has Never Been A Scientist Who Was A Greater Man.

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.

Whenever You Hear A Man Speak Of His Love For His Country, It Is A Sign That He Expects To Be Paid For It.

Complete Masculinity And Stupidity Are Often Indistinguishable.

Of Government, At Least In Democratic States, It May Be Said Briefly That It Is An Agency Engaged Wholesale, And As A Matter Of Solemn Duty, In The Performance Of Acts Which All Self-respecting Individuals Refrain From As A Matter Of Common Decency.

A Progressive Is One Who Is In Favor Of More Taxes Instead Of Less, More Bureaus And Jobholders, More Paternalism And Meddling, More Regulation Of Private Affairs And Less Liberty. In General, He Would Be Inclined To Regard The Repeal Of Any Tax As Outrageous.

How To Drink Like A Gentleman: The Things To Do And The Things Not To, As Learned In 30 Years' Extensive Research.

It Is Almost As Safe To Assume That An Artist Of Any Dignity Is Against His Country, I.e., Against The Environment In Which God Hath Placed Him, As It Is To Assume That His Country Is Against The Artist.

I Know Some Who Are Constantly Drunk On Books As Other Men Are Drunk On Whiskey.

Good Government Is That Which Delivers The Citizen From Being Done Out Of His Life And Property Too Arbitrarily And Violently-one That Relieves Him Sufficiently From The Barbaric Business Of Guarding Them To Enable Him To Engage In Gentler, More Dignified, And More Agreeable Undertakings.

Love Begins Like A Triolet And Ends Like A College Yell.

It Is Impossible To Believe That The Same God Who Permitted His Own Son To Die A Bachelor Regards Celibacy As An Actual Sin.

I Believe That It Is Better To Tell The Truth Than To Lie. I Believe That It Is Better To Be Free Than To Be A Slave. And I Believe That It Is Better To Know Than Be Ignorant.

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.

Criticism Is Prejudice Made Plausible.

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.

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 Pretenses.

If The American People Really Tire Of Democracy And Want To Make A Trial Of Fascism, I Shall Be The Last Person To Object. But If That Is Their Mood, Then They Had Better Proceed Toward Their Aim By Changing The Constitution And Not By Forgetting It.

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.

Probably The Worst Thing That Has Happened In America In My Time Is The Decay Of Confidence In The Courts. No One Can Be Sure Any More That In A Given Case They Will Uphold The Plainest Mandate Of The Constitution. On The Contrary, Everyone Begins To Be More Or Less Convinced In Advance That They Won't. Judges Are Chosen Not Because They Know The Constitution And Are In Favor Of It, But Precisely Because They Appear To Be Against It.

The Fact Is That Liberty, In Any True Sense, Is A Concept That Lies Quite Beyond The Reach Of The Inferior Man's Mind. And No Wonder, For Genuine Liberty Demands Of Its Votaries A Quality He Lacks Completely, And That Is Courage. The Man Who Loves It Must Be Willing To Fight For It; Blood, Said Jefferson, Is Its Natural Manure. Liberty Means Self-reliance, It Means Resolution, It Means The Capacity For Doing Without . . . The Average Man Doesn't Want To Be Free. He Wants To Be Safe.

Man Is A Beautiful Machine That Works Very Badly. He Is Like A Watch Of Which The Most That Can Be Said Is That Its Cosmetic Effect Is Good.

Democracy Must Be A Sound Scheme At Bottom, Else It Would Not Survive Such Cruel Strains.

Before A Man Speaks It Is Always Safe To Assume That He Is A Fool. After He Speaks, It Is Seldom Necessary To Assume It.

Clergyman: A Ticket Speculator Outside The Gates Of Heaven.

Living With A Dog Is Easy- Like Living With An Idealist.

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

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Every Election Is A Sort Of Advance Auction Sale Of Stolen Goods.

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It Is Not A Sign Of Communal Well-being When Men Turn To Their Government To Execute All Their Business For Them, But Rather A Sign Of Decay, As In The United States Today. The State, Indeed, Is But One Of The Devices That A Really Healthy Community Sets Up To Manage Its Affairs.

So Few Men Are Really Worth Knowing, That It Seems A Shameful Waste To Let An Anthropoid Prejudice Stand In The Way Of Free Association With One Who Is.

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 Most Curious Social Convention Of The Great Age In Which We Live Is The One To The Effect That Religious Opinions Should Be Respected.

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The Feelings That Beethoven Put Into His Music Were The Feelings Of A God. There Was Something Olympian In His Snarls And Rages, And There Was A Touch Of Hellfire In His Mirth.

Democracy Is Also A Form Of Worship. It Is The Worship Of Jackals By Jackasses.

Democracies Have

The Way To Deal With Superstition Is Not To Be Polite To It, But To Tackle It With All Arms, And So Rout It, Cripple It, And Make It Forever Infamous And Ridiculous.

All The Political Seers And Sorcerers Seem To Be Agreed That The Coming Presidential Campaign Will Be Full Of Bitterness, And That Most Of It Will Be Caused By Religion. I Count Prohibition As A Part Of Religion, For It Has Surely Become So In The United States. The Prohibitionists, Seeing All Their Other Arguments Destroyed By The Logic Of Events, Have Fallen Back Upon The Mystical Doctrine That God Is Somehow On Their Side, And That Opposing Them Thus Takes On The Character Of Blasphemy.

A Church Is A Place In Which Gentlemen Who Have Never Been To Heaven Brag About It To Persons Who Will Never Get There.

The Essence Of Self-fulfillment And Autonomous Culture Is An Unshakable Egotism.

We Must Be Prepared To Pay A Price For Freedom, For No Price That Is Ever Asked For It Is Half The Cost Of Doing Without It.

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.

There Is Nothing Worse Than An Idle Hour, With No Occupation Offering. People Who Have Many Such Hours Are Simply Animals Waiting Docilely For Death. We All Come To That State Soon Or Late. It Is The Curse Of Senility.

In The United States, Doing Good Has Come To Be, Like Patriotism, A Favorite Device Of Persons With Something To Sell.

Morality Is Nothing But A Struggle For Safety

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.

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.

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.

The Most Valuable Of All Human Possessions, Next To A Superior And Disdainful Air, Is The Reputation Of Being Well-to-do.

Great Artists Are Modest Almost As Seldom As They Are Faithful To Their Wives.

A Fool Who, After Plain Warning, Persists In Dosing Himself With Dangerous Drugs Should Be Free To Do So, For His Death Is A Benefit To The Race In General.

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.

They Have Taken The Care And Upbringing Of Children Out Of The Hands Of Parents, Where It Belongs, And Thrown It Upon A Gang Of Irresponsible And Unintelligent Quacks.

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

Quotation Marks

Hamlet Has Been Played By 5,000 Actors, No Wonder He Is Crazy.

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.

Philosophy Consists Very Largely Of One Philosopher Arguing That All Others Are Jackasses. He Usually Proves It, And I Should Add That He Also Usually Proves That He Is One Himself.

There Is No Idea So Stupid That You Can't Find A Professor Who Will Believe It.

The Fact Is That The Average Man's Love Of Liberty Is Nine-tenths Imaginary, Exactly Like His Love Of Sense, Justice And Truth.

There Is Always An Easy Solution To Every Problem - Neat, Plausible, And Wrong.

Simple Solutions

I Believe There Is A Limit Beyond Which Free Speech Cannot Go, But It's A Limit That's Very Seldom Mentioned. It's The Point Where Free Speech Begins To Collide With The Right To Privacy. I Don't Think There Are Any Other Conditions To Free Speech. I've Got A Right To Say And Believe Anything I Please, But I Haven't Got A Right To Press It On Anybody Else. .... Nobody's Got A Right To Be A Nuisance To His Neighbors.

There Are Men So Philosophical That They Can See Humor In Their Own Toothaches. But There Has Never Lived A Man So Philosophical That He Could See The Toothache In His Own Humor.

The Martini: The Only American Invention As Perfect As The Sonnet.

It Takes No More Actual Sagacity To Carry On The Everyday Hawking And Haggling Of The World, Or To Ladle Out Its Normal Doses Of Bad Medicine And Worse Law, Than It Takes To Operate A Taxicab Or Fry A Pan Of Fish.

The Only Way To Reconcile Science And Religion Is To Set Up Something Which Is Not Science And Something That Is Not Religion.

Science And Religion

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

I Believe That Religion, Generally Speaking, Has Been A Curse To Mankind.

The Most Dangerous Man To Any Government Is The Man Who Is Able To Think Things Out... Without Regard To The Prevailing Superstitions And Taboos. Almost Inevitably He Comes To The Conclusion That The Government He Lives Under Is Dishonest, Insane, Intolerable.

The Only Cure For Contempt Is Counter-contempt.

No Man Ever Quite Believes In Any Other Man. One May Believe In An Idea Absolutely, But Not In A Man.

My Guess Is That Well Over Eighty Per Cent. Of The Human Race Goes Through Life Without Having A Single Original Thought.

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.

People Say We Need Religion When What They Really Mean Is We Need Police.

There Are No Ugly Cigars, Only Ugly Smokers.

Henry James Would Have Been Vastly Improved As A Novelist By A Few Whiffs Of The Chicago Stockyard.

You Come Into The World With Nothing, And The Purpose Of Your Life Is To Make Something Out Of Nothing.

[art Is] An Attempt To Escape From Life.

Absence Is The Dark-room In Which Lovers Develop Negatives.

The Notion That Artists Flourish Upon Adversity And Misunderstanding, That They Are Able To Function To The Utmost In An Atmosphere Of Indifference Or Hostility - This Notion Is Nine-tenths Nonsense.

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

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.

The Basic Fact About Human Existence Is Not That It Is A Tragedy, But That It Is A Bore. It Is Not So Much A War As An Endless Standing In Line.

Capitalism Undoubtedly Has Certain Boils And Blotches Upon It, But Has It As Many As Government? Has It As Many As Marriage? Has It As Many As Religion? I Doubt It. It Is The Only Basic Institution Of Modern Man That Shows Any Genuine Health And Vigor.

Communism, Like Any Other Revealed Religion, Is Largely Made Up Of Prophecies.

Even A Superstitious Man Has Certain Inalienable Rights: The Right To Harbor And Indulge His Imbecilities, Provided Only That He Does Not Try To Inflict Them Upon Others By Force; He Has The Right To Argue For Them As Eloquently As He Can. But He Has No Right To Be Protected From The Criticism Of Those Who Do Not Hold Them. He Has No Right To Demand That They Be Treated As Sacred. He Has No Right To Preach Them Without Challenge.

When A Woman Says She Won't, It's A Good Sign That She Will. And When She Says She Will, It Is An Even Better Sign.

People Do Not Expect To Find Chastity In A Whorehouse. Why, Then, Do They Expect To Find Honesty And Humanity In Government, A Congeries Of Institutions Whose Modus Operandi Consists Of Lying, Cheating, Stealing, And If Need Be, Murdering Those Who Resist?

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.

A Poet Over 30 Is Pathetic

We Are Here And It Is Now. Further Than That, All Human Knowledge Is Moonshine.

A Prohibitionist Is The Sort Of Man One Couldn't Care To Drink With, Even If He Drank.

Love Is The Delusion That One Woman Differs From Another.

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

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 A Folly.

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

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.

A Man Always Blames The Woman Who Fools Him. In The Same Way He Blames The Door He Walks Into In The Dark.

Funny Inspirational

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.

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 More A Man Dreams, The Less He Believes.

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.

When A Private Citizen Is Robbed, A Worthy Man Is Deprived Of The Fruits Of His Industry And Thrift; When The Government Is Robbed, The Worst That Happens Is That Certain Rogues And Loafers Have Less Money To Play With Than They Had Before.

The Liberation Of The Human Mind Has Never Been Furthered By Dunderheads; It Has Been Furthered By Gay Fellows Who Heaved Dead Cats Into Sanctuaries And Then Went Roistering Down The Highways Of The World, Proving To All Men That Doubt, After All, Was Safe - That The God In The Sanctuary Was Finite In His Power And Hence A Fraud. One Horse-laugh Is Worth Ten Thousand Syllogisms. It Is Not Only More Effective; It Is Also Vastly More Intelligent.

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

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 Effect Of Every Sort Of New Deal Is To Increase And Prosper The Criminal Class. It Teaches Precisely What All Professional Criminals Believe, To Wit, That, It Is Neither Virtuous Nor Necessary To Suffer And To Do Without.

A Large Part Of Altruism, Even When It Is Perfectly Honest, Is Grounded Upon The Fact That It Is Uncomfortable To Have Unhappy People About One.

I Well Recall My Horror When I Heard For The First Time, Of A Journalist Who Had Laid In A Pair Of What Were Then Called Bicycle Pants And Taken To Golf; It Was As If I Had Encountered A Studhorse With His Hair Done Up In Frizzes, And Pink Bowknots Peeking Out Of Them. It Seemed, In Some Vague Way, Ignominious, And Even A Bit Indelicate.

The Way To Hold A Husband Is To Keep Him A Little Jealous; The Way To Lose Him Is To Keep Him A Little More Jealous.

It Is Hell, Of Course, That Makes Priests Powerful, Not Heaven, For After Thousands Of Years Of So-called Civilization Fear Remains The One Common Denominator Of Mankind

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.

God Is The Immemorial Refuge Of The Incompetent, The Helpless, And The Miserable. They Find Not Only Sanctuary In His Arms, But Also A Kind Of Superiority, Soothing To Their Macerated Egos; He Will Set Them Above Their Betters.

Every Autobiography ... Becomes An Absorbing Work Of Fiction, With Something Of The Charm Of A Cryptogram.

I Am, In Fact, The Complete Anti-messiah, And Detest Converts Almost As Much As I Detest Missionaries. My Writings, Such As They Are, Have Had Only One Purpose: To Attain For H. L. Mencken That Feeling Of Tension Relieved And Function Achieved Which A Cow Enjoys On Giving Milk.

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.

The Most Popular Man Under A Democracy Is Not The Most Democratic Man, But The Most Despotic Man. The Common Folk Delight In The Exactions Of Such A Man. They Like Him To Boss Them. Their Natural Gait Is The Goose Step.

The Smallest Atom Of Truth Represents Some Man's Bitter Toil And Agony; For Every Ponderable Chunk Of It There Is A Brave Truth-seeker's Grave Upon Some Lonely Ash-dump And A Soul Roasting In Hell.

One Of The Laudable By-products Of The Freudian Quackery Is The Discovery That Lying, In Most Cases, Is Involuntary And Inevitable--that The Liar Can No More Avoid It Than He Can Avoid Blinking His Eyes When A Light Flashes Or Jumping When A Bomb Goes Off Behind Him.

It Is Impossible To Think Of A Man Of Any Actual Force And Originality, Universally Recognized As Having Those Qualities, Who Spent His Whole Life Appraising And Describing The Work Of Other Men.

Metaphysics Is Almost Always An Attempt To Prove The Incredible By An Appeal To The Unintelligible.

[texas Is] The Place Where There Are The Most Cows And The Least Milk And The Most Rivers And The Least Water In Them, And Where You Can Look The Farthest To See The Least.

Religion, After All, Is Nothing But An Hypothesis Framed To Account For What Is Evidentially Unaccounted For.

Most People Want Security In This World, Not Liberty.

No Democratic Delusion Is More Fatuous Than That Which Holds That All Men Are Capable Of Reason, And Hence Susceptible To Conversion By Evidence. If Religions Depended Upon Evidence For Their Prolongation, Then All Of Them Would Collapse.

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.

Any Man Who Afflicts The Human Race With Ideas Must Be Prepared To See Them Misunderstood.

I Drink Exactly As Much As I Want, And One Drink More.

Love Is Like War: Easy To Begin But Very Hard To Stop.

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

No Reporter Of My Generation, Whatever His Genius, Ever Really Rated Spats And A Walking Stick Until He Had Covered Both A Lynching And A Revolution.

There Are No Institutions In America: There Are Only Fashions.

The Liberation Of The Human Mind Has Never Been Furthered By Dunderheads.

Kant Was Probably The Worst Writer Ever Heard Of On Earth Before Karl Marx. Some Of His Ideas Were Really Quite Simple, But He Always Managed To Make Them Seem Unintelligible. I Hope He Is In Hell.

Most People Are Unable To Write Because They Are Unable To Think, And They Are Unable To Think Because They Congenitally Lack The Equipment To Do So, Just As They Congenitally Lack The Equipment To Fly Over The Moon.

Science, At Bottom, Is Really Anti-intellectual. It Always Distrusts Pure Reason, And Demands The Production Of Objective Fact.

It Is Difficult To Believe That Even Idiots Ever Succumbed To Such Transparent Contradictions, To Such Gaudy Processions Of Mere Counter-words, To So Vast And Obvious A Nonsensicalitysentence After Sentence That Has No Apparent Meaning At All--stuff Quite As Bad As The Worst Bosh Of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

In Any Combat Between A Rogue And A Fool The Sympathy Of Mankind Is Always With The Rogue.

Every Complex Problem Has A Simple Solution That Doesn't Work.

Philosophy First Constructs A Scheme Of Happiness And Then Tries To Fit The World To It.

Liberty ... Was A Two-headed Boon. There Was First, The Liberty Of The People As A Whole To Determine The Forms Of Their Own Government, To Levy Their Own Taxes, And To Make Their Own Laws.... There Was Second, The Liberty Of The Individual Man To Live His Own Life, Within The Limits Of Decency And Decorum, As He Pleased -- Freedom From The Despotism Of The Majority.

Not By Accident, You May Be Sure, Do The Christian Scriptures Make The Father Of Knowledge A Serpent - Slimy, Sneaking And Abominable.

Historian: An Unsuccessful Novelist.

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.

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

[the] Erroneous Assumption Is To The Effect That The Aim Of Public Education Is To Fill The Young Of The Species With Knowledge And Awaken Their Intelligence, And So Make Them Fit To Discharge The Duties Of Citizenship In An Enlightened And Independent Manner. Nothing Could Be Further From The Truth. 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 Standardised Citizenry, To Put Down Dissent And Originality.

Every Decent Man Is Ashamed Of The Government He Lives Under.

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

Each Party Steals So Many Articles Of Faith From The Other, And The Candidates Spend So Much Time Making Each Other's Speeches, That By The Time Election Day Is Past There Is Nothing Much To Do Save Turn The Sitting Rascals Out And Let A New Gang In.

On Some Great And Glorious Day The Plain Folks Of The Land Will Reach Their Heart's Desire At Last, And The White House Will Be Adorned By A Downright Moron.

Truth - Something Somehow Discreditable To Someone.

Fame: An Embalmer Trembling With Stage Fright.

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.

No Matter How Happily A Woman May Be Married, It Always Pleases Her To Discover That There Is A Nice Man Who Wishes That She Were Not.

The Older I Grow The More I Distrust The Familiar Doctrine That Age Brings Wisdom.

How Little It Takes To Make Life Unbearable: A Pebble In The Shoe, A Cockroach In The Spaghetti, A Woman's Laugh.

Those Tragic Comedians, The Chamber Of Commerce Red Hunters, The Women's Christian Temperance Union Smellers, The Censors Of Books, The Klan Regulators, The Methodist Prowlers, The Baptist Guardians Of Sacred Vessels-we Have The National Mentality Of A Police Lieutenant.

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.

Truth Would Quickly Cease To Be Stranger Than Fiction, Once We Got As Used To It.

Never Let Your Inferiors Do You A Favor - It Will Be Extremely Costly.

The Genuine Music Lover May Accept The Carnal Husk Of Opera To Get At The Kernel Of Actual Music Within, But That Is No Sign That He Approves The Carnal Husk Or Enjoys Gnawing Through It.

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

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.

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

You Can't Do Anything About The Length Of Your Life, But You Can Do Something About Its Width And Depth.

This Combat Between Proletariat And Plutocracy Is, After All, Itself A Civil War. Two Inferiorities Struggle For The Privilege Of Polluting The World.

Temptation Is A Woman's Weapon And Man's Excuse.

What We Need In This Country Is A General Improvement In Eating. We Have The Best Raw Materials In The World, Both Quantitatively And Qualitatively, But Most Of Them Are Ruined In The Process Of Preparing Them For The Table.

The Public, With Its Mob Yearning To Be Instructed, Edified And Pulled By The Nose, Demands Certainties; It Must Be Told Definitely And A Bit Raucously That This Is True And That Is False. But There Are No Certainties.

I Confess I Enjoy Democracy Immensely. It Is Incomparably Idiotic, And Hence Incomparably Amusing.

Christian Endeavor Is Notoriously Hard On Female Pulchritude.

One Is Conscious Of No Brave And Noble Earnestness In It, Of No Generalized Passion For Intellectual And Spiritual Adventure, Of No Organized Determination To Think Things Out. What Is There Is A Highly Self-conscious And Insipid Correctness, A Bloodless Respectability Submergence Of Matter In Manner--in Brief, What Is There Is The Feeble, Uninspiring Quality Of German Painting And English Music.

Politics, Under A Democracy, Reduces Itself To A Mere Struggle For Office By Flatterers Of The Proletariat; Even When A Superior Man Prevails At That Disgusting Game He Must Prevail At The Cost Of His Self-respect. Not Many Superior Men Make The Attempt. The Average Great Captain Of The Rabble, When He Is Not Simply A Weeper Over Irremediable Wrongs, Is A Hypocrite So Far Gone That He Is Unconscious Of His Own Hypocrisy.. A Slimy Fellow, Offensive To The Nose.

To Die For An Idea; It Is Unquestionably Noble. But How Much Nobler It Would Be If Men Died For Ideas That Were True!

In The Main, There Are Two Sorts Of Books: Those That No One Reads And Those That No One Ought To Read.

Women Decide The Larger Questions Of Life Correctly And Quickly, Not Because They Are Lucky Guessers, Not Because They Are Divinely Inspired, Not Because They Practise A Magic Inherited From Savagery, But Simply And Solely Because They Have Sense. They See At A Glance What Most Men Could Not See With Searchlights And Telescopes.... They Are The Supreme Realists Of The Race.

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Craig T. Nelson

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