~ Henry Mencken Quotes ~

[MysteRy]

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right.

[MysteRy]

We must respect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

[MysteRy]

We must repsect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.

[MysteRy]

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward and you will have the truth about him.

[MysteRy]

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

[MysteRy]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins all of them imaginary.

[MysteRy]

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have taking one with another no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

[MysteRy]

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.

[MysteRy]

The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

[MysteRy]

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.

[MysteRy]

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

[MysteRy]

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

[MysteRy]

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to when it is cured on one error is usually simply another error and maybe one worse than the first one.