The New Clarion

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• c andrew // Nov 21, 2012 at 11:56 am

  Hi Inspector,

  I went looking for the “good and hard” quote by Mencken and ran across so many others of note and applicablity, that I figured I’d share them here as both entertainment and consolation.

  If this comment is egregiously over the top by New Clarion standards, feel free to delete it.

  —

  Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
  “A Mencken Chrestomathy” (1949) page 624

  Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
  A Book of Burlesques (1916)

  Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
  A Book of Burlesques (1916)

  Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
  A Little Book in C Major (1916)

  Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
  A Little Book in C major (1916) ; later published in A Mencken Crestomathy (1949).

  Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
  “The Divine Afflatus” in New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917); later published in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

  Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; 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, most of them imaginary.
  In Defense of Women (1918)

  School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
  The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), pg. 217

  The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?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. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.
  Prejudices, First Series (1919)

  All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. 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.
  Smart Set (December 1919)

  When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. 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.
  Baltimore Sun (26 July 1920)

  The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
  On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936), p. 279

  The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
  Baltimore Evening Sun (12 February 1923)

  What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
  Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)

  Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
  Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)

  I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a [government] jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital — or his chief heir, in case he has perished — goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.
  “The Malevolent Jobholder,” The American Mercury (June 1924), p. 156

  Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing. In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority — that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous. But in part it must resort to force, i.e., to law. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. Always they condition it with the doctrine that the state, i.e., the majority, has a sort of right of eminent domain in acts, and even in ideas — that it is perfectly free, whenever it is so disposed, to forbid a man to say what he honestly believes. Whenever his notions show signs of becoming “dangerous,” ie, of being heard and attended to, it exercises that prerogative. And the overwhelming majority of citizens believe in supporting it in the outrage. Including especially the Liberals, who pretend — and often quite honestly believe — that they are hot for liberty. They never really are. Deep down in their hearts they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be fatal to democracy — that a government based upon shifting and irrational opinion must keep it within bounds or run a constant risk of disaster. They themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them. If a law were passed tomorrow taking away the property of a large group of presumably well-to-do persons — say, bondholders of the railroads — without compensation and without even colorable reason, they would not oppose it; they would be in favor of it. The liberty to have and hold property is not one they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it.
  “Liberty and Democracy” in the Baltimore Evening Sun (13 April 1925),

  Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
  “More Tips for Novelists” in the Chicago Tribune (2 May 1926)

  Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched 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. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
  Notes On Journalism in the Chicago Tribune (19 September 1926)

  I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
  “Why Liberty?”, in the Chicago Tribune (30 January 1927)

  Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
  Baltimore Evening Sun (4 April 1927)

  The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever field, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But the convention that I have mentioned frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.
  There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly. If you doubt it, then ask any pious fellow of your acquaintance to put what he believes into the form of an affidavit, and see how it reads… . “I, John Doe, being duly sworn, do say that I believe that, at death, I shall turn into a vertebrate without substance, having neither weight, extent nor mass, but with all the intellectual powers and bodily sensations of an ordinary mammal; . . . and that, for the high crime and misdemeanor of having kissed my sister-in-law behind the door, with evil intent, I shall be boiled in molten sulphur for one billion calendar years.” Or, “I, Mary Roe, having the fear of Hell before me, do solemnly affirm and declare that I believe it was right, just, lawful and decent for the Lord God Jehovah, seeing certain little children of Beth-el laugh at Elisha’s bald head, to send a she-bear from the wood, and to instruct, incite, induce and command it to tear forty-two of them to pieces.” Or, “I, the Right Rev._____ _________, Bishop of _________,D.D., LL.D., do honestly, faithfully and on my honor as a man and a priest, declare that I believe that Jonah swallowed the whale,” or vice versa, as the case may be. No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest. One may forgive a Communist or a Single Taxer on the ground that there is something the matter with his ductless glands, and that a Winter in the south of France would relieve him. But the average theologian is a hearty, red-faced, well-fed fellow with no discernible excuse in pathology. He disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician. In a well-organized world he would be on the stone-pile. But in the world as it exists we are asked to listen to him, not only politely, but even reverently, and with our mouths open.
  The American Mercury (March, 1930); first printed, in part, in the Baltimore Evening Sun (9 December 1929)

  Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
  It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit. The Fathers, in framing it, did not have powerful minorities in mind; what they sought to hobble was simply the majority. But that is a detail. The important thing is that the Bill of Rights sets forth, in the plainest of plain language, the limits beyond which even legislatures may not go. The Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, decided that it was bound to execute that intent, and for a hundred years that doctrine remained the corner-stone of American constitutional law.
  The American Mercury (May 1930)

  One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.
  “Mussolini” in the Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1931

  If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.
  The American Mercury (March 1936) – referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
  Newspaper Days: 1899-1906 (1941)

  It is [a politician’s] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
  Notes on Democracy (1926), Part II, p. 99

  Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.
  Notes on Democracy (1926)

  Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world.1 Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws—but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state—but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.
  Notes on Democracy (1926)

  A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

  Nature abhors a moron.

  The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

  Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

  Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer’s mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.

  An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

  A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.

  Platitude — An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

  Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.

  Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

  Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.

  We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

  Historian — An unsuccessful novelist.

  Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

  The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

  Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

  The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.

  Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.

  Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

  Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.

  Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

  Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

  A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.

  Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn’t they’d be married, too.

  Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

  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.

  Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

  Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

  Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

  A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

  Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

  Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
  A: Why do men go to zoos?

  A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.

  In every unbeliever’s heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic’s Hell.

  The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

  If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.

  Minority Report : H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)

  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.
  1

  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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
  79

  Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives. There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson’s day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties. No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions.
  197

  The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling. Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won’t. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it.
  241

  My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors. […] But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they’d be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible.
  329

  The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
  397

  The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

  …I have given my whole life to newspapers. I am convinced that they have abandoned their functions, and in an abject and ignominious manner, in the present war. Nine-tenths of them, and even more than nine-tenths, print the official blather without any attempt to scrutinize it… It is a disgraceful spectacle, but I do not believe that anything can be done about it. Roosevelt has taken the press into camp as certainly has he has taken the Supreme Court. It has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official.
  June 10, 1944

  1
  I’m reminded of those unfortunate travelers who, having an x-ray readable printing of the 4th amendment on their T-shirts, are then singled out by the all-american stasi, for “additional screening.”

• c andrew // Nov 21, 2012 at 11:57 am

  Hi Inspector,

  I posted a long comment with a bunch of HL Mencken quotes in it, but it apparently disappeared into the ether.

• Steve D // Nov 21, 2012 at 12:55 pm

  ‘because he is too much of a wimp to do anything but more of the same’
  That was our only chance. That he was such a wimp he might be manipulated into doing the right thing.
  ‘I posted a long comment with a bunch of HL Mencken quotes in it, but it apparently disappeared into the ether.’
  Well, the best thing to do is to write it in another file which you save and then copy it into the blog page. That way if you lose it into the ether, you can repost it.

  ‘I posted a long comment with a bunch of HL Mencken quotes in it, but it apparently disappeared into the ether.’

• c andrew // Nov 21, 2012 at 8:39 pm

  Hi Steve,

  I had already copied it and tried a repost. The site came back and said that it looked like a duplicate post even though the original hadn’t posted. I’m assuming it’s caught up in the works somewhere and may still swim its way to the surface.

  Here are two of them, and I think they are both apropos to the topic of the post. (The others were as well, but much longer.)

  Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
  A Little Book in C Major (1916)

  Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

  A Little Book in C major (1916) ; later published in A Mencken Crestomathy (1949).

• Inspector // Nov 23, 2012 at 1:51 pm

  Would you believe that I had both of those in my head when I was posting this? A friend even sent the second one to me on this very topic.

• Inspector // Nov 23, 2012 at 2:04 pm

  There you go. Found it in the spam filter. Do be patient with the poor thing… it does ever so much work and it’s bound to miss every now and then. Just let us know and we’ll correct it.

• c andrew // Nov 23, 2012 at 10:26 pm

  Inspector,

  Your post certainly brought them both to mind, but I was just looking for the good and hard one. Cuz that’s what’s a-coming.

• Inspector // Nov 24, 2012 at 8:35 am

  I replied to that Mencken quote with an old maxim of my own, which I had thought of in response to it some years ago:

  There is some small solace, I think, in the knowledge that Democracy will give the fools what they deserve. It is immediately wiped out, however, by the knowledge that it will give us what they deserve, too.

• c andrew // Nov 24, 2012 at 10:53 pm

  Too true, Inspector.

  My version of that was that I didn’t much mind the fools getting what they deserved but very much objected to me get what they deserved at the same time.