― H.L. Mencken
“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. 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, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
― H.L. Mencken
― H.L. Mencken
“It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.”
― H.L. Mencken
― H.L. Mencken
“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.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women
4 comments:
H.L. Mencken, who was born in 1880, supported Germany during both WWI and WWII.
He said that the United States' form or representative democracy was "a system where inferior men dominated their superiors."
He vigorously argued against Christianity, creationism, and the existence of God.
He died in 1956. He now knows the truth.
that or he is just dead and was right
H.L. Mencken, the "Sage of Baltimore," was a bigot and a snob. His personal diaries, opened after his death, revealed racial prejudice and anti-Semitism.
He reported on the Scopes Monkey trial (1925) for the Baltimore Sun calling the native Tennesseans "the great unwashed."
He was equally dirisive of the Eastern Shore calling us "our little country cousins and their flea-bitten Virginia neighbors."
He so enraged the Shore people that they would meet the boat in Rock Hall (no bay-bridge in those days)and throw all the Sunpapers into the Bay.
Mencken's views were very common to his era. He just rejected the pretense of decorum of the Victorians and the castrating political correctness we suffer now.
Post a Comment