Sean > Sean's Quotes

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched 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 anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
― H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second series

“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“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.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“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. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“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.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
― H. L. Mencken

“Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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.”
― H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. ”
― H. L. Mencken

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”
― H. L. Mencken

“Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”
― H.L. Mencken

“If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God....”
― H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
― H. L. Mencken

“The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report