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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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
Certainties
Demands
Certainty
Demand
Decision
Public
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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