Henry Louis Mencken
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The most prominent newspaperman, book reviewer, and political commentator of his day, Henry Louis Mencken was a libertarian before the word came into usage. His prose is as clear as an azure sky, and his rhetoric as deadly as a rifle shot. Frequent targets of his lance were "uplifters", social reformers of any stripe, boobs & quacks, and the insatiable American appetite for nonsense and gaudy sham.
Mencken's writing is endearing because of its wit, its crisp style, and the obvious delight he takes in it.
We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of 'viewers with alarm'.
Thus, my view of my country is predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
- I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind, that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
- I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
- I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.
- I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
- I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech.
- I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
- I believe in the reality of progress.
- I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
On Liberty and Government
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself. Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
"Good government is that which
delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and
violently, one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them
to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings."
"Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of
us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed
against us."
"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to
get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many
humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."
"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."
"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."
"The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of
English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for
forming complicated and unworkable rules."
"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never
been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, criminal,
grasping, and unintelligent."
"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."
Gibbons Burke's H. L Mencken website
W J Cash in The
American Mercury - editor, H L Mencken