Axidava

The Road To Doubt

H. L. Mencken

The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fill its devotee with wonder at the marvels of God.

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Mencken On Actors

H. L. Mencken

“In France they call an actor a m’as-tu-vu, which, anglicised, means a have-you-seen-me?… The average actor holds the mirror up to nature and sees in it only the reflection of himself.”

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Mencken On History

H. L. Mencken

It is the misfortune of humanity that its history is chiefly written by third-rate men. The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, not a syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left to college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads.

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Mencken On The Negro

H. L. Mencken

I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American Negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the Negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it.

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A New Use For Churches

H. L. Mencken

The argument by design, it may be granted, establishes a reasonable ground for accepting the existence of God. It makes belief, at all events, quite as intelligible as unbelief.

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Wild Shots

H. L. Mencken

If I had the time, and there were no sweeter follies offering, I should like to write an essay on the books that have quite failed of achieving their original purposes, and are yet of respectable use and potency for other purposes.

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Politics Under Democracy

H. L. Mencken

Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i. e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos.

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Pater Patriæ

H. L. Mencken

If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professional patriots!

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Venus At The Domestic Hearth

H. L. Mencken

One inclines to the notion that women—and especially homely women—greatly overestimated the importance of physical beauty in their eternal conspiracy against the liberty of men.

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The Eternal Cripple

H. L. Mencken

Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a bacillus, say, is perfect.

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The Restoration Of Beauty

H. L. Mencken

I have said that the poetry which safeguards Christianity from destruction today was borrowed from the ancient Jews, authors of the two Testaments. But there was a long period during which it was overshadowed by purely logical ideas, many of them of a sort that would be called bolshevistic today.

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Veritas Odium Parit

H. L. Mencken

An old human delusion, largely fostered by theologians, is the one to the effect that truth has a mysterious medicinal power—that its propagation makes the world better and man happier … et cognoscetis veritatem, et veritas liberabit vos.

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Portrait Of An Ideal World

H. L. Mencken

That alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, when taken into the human organism, acts as a depressant, not as a stimulant, is now so much a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it.

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The Man And His Shadow

H. L. Mencken

Every man, whatever his actual qualities, is credited with and judged by certain general qualities that are supposed to appertain to his sex, particularly by women.

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The New Galahad

H. L. Mencken

My agents in attendance upon the so-called moving pictures tell me that persons who frequent such shows begin to tire of Western films—that they are no longer roused to clapper-clawing by the spectacle of actors in patent-leather jack-boots murdering Indians and Mexicans.

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Moral Indignation

H. L. Mencken

The ill-fame of the Turks in the English-speaking world is not due to their political medievalism, as is usually alleged, but to their practise of polygamy.

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The Animal That Thinks

H. L. Mencken

That the great majority of human beings, even under our perfected Christian civilization, are still almost as incapable of rational thought as so many diamond-back terrapin—this is a fact to which we have all been made privy of late by the babbling of eminent psychologists. Granted. But let us not rashly assume that this infirmity is confined strictly to the nether herd—that, above the level where thinking may be said genuinely to begin, it goes on, level by level, to greater and greater heights of clarity and acumen.

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The Mime

H. L. Mencken

The fundamental objection to actors, stripping the business of all mere sophistry and snobbery, is that they give away the idiotic vanity of the whole male sex.

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Mencken On Eugenics

H. L. Mencken

The error of the eugenists lies in the assumption that a physically healthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and the pediculae, but not of the higher animals, e. g., horses, dogs and men. In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities, chiefly of the spirit. Imagine estimating philosophers by their chest expansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions!

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Mencken On Lying

H. L. Mencken

Lying stands on a different plane from all other moral offenses, not because it is intrinsically more heinous or less heinous, but simply because it is the only one that may be accurately measured.

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The Rat-Trap

H. L. Mencken

Much of the discontent with modern marriage centers in the fact that the laws which condition it and safeguard it all assume that its purpose is the founding of a family.

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Mencken On The Jews

H. L. Mencken

The Jews, like the Americans, labor under a philosophical dualism, and in both cases it is a theological heritage. On the one hand there is the idealism that is lovely and uplifting and will get a man into heaven, and on the other hand there is the realism that works.

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The Burden Of Humor

H. L. Mencken

What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh?

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The Mind Of The Slave

H. L. Mencken

One of the forgotten divisions between men and men is that separating those who enjoy the work they have to do in the world and those who suffer it only as a necessary evil.

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Bugaboo

H. L. Mencken

All of the Great Thinkers of the world, East, West, North and South, have been alarming their customers, for two or three years past, with the same bugaboo.

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Mencken On Alcohol

H. L. Mencken

Envy, as I have said, is at the heart of the messianic delusion, the mania to convert the happy sinner into a “good” man, and so make him miserable. And at the heart of that envy is fear—the fear to sin, to take a chance, to monkey with the buzzsaw.

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