21 quotes
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Human life is basically a comedy.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
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.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, 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.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
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.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
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...The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)