Mencken has great quotes! Pithy, pointed and concise.

Too bad the author of the article who quoted Mencken isn't anywhere in his league. In fact, I'd say Michael Boldin wouldn't make varsity in high school.


"All the extravagance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half." - H.L. Mencken.

H. L. Mencken suffers from the delusion that he is H. L. Mencken. There is no cure for a disease of that magnitude. --Maxwell Bodenheim

Honesty is the best policy?

Barack seems to think so.
Kind of a risky step to take.
Hillary is going with the tried and true method of treating the American electorate like retarded children.

H.L. Mencken purely RAWKS, btw.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good

~HLM

H.L. Mencken really is underrated in American writing.

Either those drapes go, or I do. -- Oscar Wilde's last words.

/I can has crotchety old weirdo quote thread?

Did Shaggy_C get filterpwned?

/he was first
//now he's last

Something_Creative: Did Shaggy_C get filterpwned?

/he was first
//now he's last

I see that too. weird.

Personal favorite:

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats."

With a pig's eyes that never look up, with a pig's snout that loves the muck, with a pig's brain that knows only the sty, and with a pig's squeal that cries only when he's hurt, he sometimes opens his pig's mouth, tusked and ugly, and let's out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habitat. --William Alan White on H.L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken

Bloody William:
/I can has crotchety old weirdo quote thread?


My mother had a term for such people "oldies but goodies."

/Thanks mom!!
//I'll read sane people from whatever age...that's the magic of books.

LargeCanine - what's weird is that he seems to have been talking about actual boobies and not indicating that his was the primary statement of the thread, which is what causes the time-delay.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."--H.L. Mencken

Pillager: 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.
H. L. Mencken

"The American people, taking one with the other, are the most timorous, sniviling, platoonish, ignominious mob of serfs and gobsteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the Middle Ages."

/ahh...the wiff of flattery. How I like it!

Something_Creative: LargeCanine - what's weird is that he seems to have been talking about actual boobies and not indicating that his was the primary statement of the thread, which is what causes the time-delay.

A little game to keep myself occupied. I'm very lonely...

Pithy writer and observer, but not particularly enlightened.

Couple of fave raves...

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

~H. L. Mencken

/Still looking for a Mencken quote about boobies to confirm Shaggy's assertion.

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." - H. L. Mencken

Yet, he was fairly disingenuous with his hatred of Jews, not that there's anything that would have kept him out of office with that.

The Uplifters Try It Again
by H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Sun
Nov. 30, 1925

The new law that it advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down. It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation's proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.

Here I do not indulge in theory. The hard facts are publicly on display in New York State, where a law of exactly the same tenor is already on the books the so-called Sullivan Law. In order to get it there, of course, the Second Amendment had to be severely strained, but the uplifters advocated the straining unanimously, and to the tune of loud hosannas, and the courts, as usual, were willing to sign on the dotted line. It is now a dreadful felony in New York to "have or possess" a pistol. Even if one keeps it locked in a bureau drawer at home, one may be sent to the hoosegow for ten years. More, men who have done no more are frequently bumped off. The cops, suspecting a man, say, of political heresy, raid his house and look for copies of the Nation. They find none, and are thus baffled but at the bottom of a trunk they do find a rusted and battered revolver. So he goes to trial for violating the Sullivan Law, and is presently being psycho-analyzed by the uplifters at Sing Sing.

With what result? With the general result that New York, even more than Chicago, is the heaven of footpads, hijackers, gunmen and all other such armed thugs. Their hands upon their pistols, they know they are safe. Not one citizen out of a hundred that they tackle is armed for getting a license to keep a revolver is a difficult business, and carrying one without it is more dangerous than submitting to robbery. So the gunmen flourish and give humble thanks to God. Like the bootleggers, they are hot and unanimous for Law Enforcement.

Entire article (new window)

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry." - H. L. Mencken

I'm going to remember that one. Tis' true. The Vatican says birth control is not allowed but yet says it's okay to count days to avoid the most fertile ones? I'm surprised they didn't just ban numbers instead. That's still birth control.

Yet, with all this unthinkable wealth, it has been incapable of reducing poverty, improving our schools, preventing 9-11, catching those who perpetrated the attacks, making health care affordable, reducing crime, and so on

Here we go again with the bungling incompetent idiots defense.

HLM was the HST of his time.

Bless him!

One of my favorite HLM quotes, Warren Ellis used it to cap an issue of Transmetropolitan:

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

Of course he doesn't hate Boobies!

Mencken has been my "hero" for years.