Quote

The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.

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
Rather
Overlooked
Peace
Vigor
War
Decay
Means
Proof
Mean
Constantly
Thing
Evidence
Health
Talk
Abolishing

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
H. L. Mencken
Image
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H. L. Mencken
Image
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
H. L. Mencken
Image
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
H. L. Mencken
Image
...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
H. L. Mencken