Play | Topics | Authors | Random

Danh ngôn của H. L. Mencken (Sứ mệnh: 4)

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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.
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.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
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.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
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.
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.