Quote

Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Excusable
Lying
Metallic
Success
Unavoidable
Become
Borne
Without
Hence
Would
Innocent
Life
Mere
Offers
Syllogism

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
H. L. Mencken
Image
I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
H. L. Mencken