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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Necessary
Simple
Dispose
Problem
Formula
Formulas
Familiar
Exists
Deny
Argument

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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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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'.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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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.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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There are some 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.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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