Mencken Quotations

[Nakharar]

I got this from another website. Mencken was the best known social commentator and journalist in the US during the 1930s through 1950s. Something which Ara Baliozian clearly apes after, but will never attain.

 

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

 

Celebrity: Someone who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know.

 

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

 

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 

Some quotes :

 

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

 

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

 

"When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands."

 

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

 

"The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have."

 

"People constantly speak of "the government" doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect."

 

"Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands."

 

"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth—that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."

 

"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."