Lillie Fortenbaugh

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Here's another collection of Mencken quotations:

Wikiquote:

Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956), better known as H. L. Mencken, was a twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mencken,_H._L.

 

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The Cult of Hope
by H.L. Mencken From Prejudices: Second Series, 1920, pp. 211-218

Of all the sentimental errors that reign and rage in this incomparable Republic, the worst is that which confuses the function of criticism, whether aesthetic, political or social, with the function of reform. Almost invariably it takes the form of a protest: “The fellow condemns without offering anything better. Why tear down without building up?” So snivel the sweet ones: so wags the national tongue. The messianic delusion becomes a sort of universal murrain. It is impossible to get an audience for an idea that is not "constructive"—i.e., that is not glib, and uplifting, and full of hope, and hence capable of tickling the emotions by leaping the intermediate barrier of intelligence.

In this protest and demand, of course, there is nothing but the babbling of men who mistake their feelings for thoughts. The truth is that criticism, if it were confined to the proposing of alternative schemes, would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all, for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is to demonstrate it. The poet, if the victim is a poet, is simply one as bare of gifts as a herring is of fur: no conceivable suggestion will ever make him write actual poetry. And the plan of reform, in politics, sociology or what not, is simply beyond the pale of reason; no change in it or improvement of it will ever make it acheive the impossible. Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country, particularly in the field of governmental reform. The trouble with them is not only that they won’t and don’t work; the trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. To tackle them with a proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable argument of it, is sound criticism; to tackle them with another solution that is quite as bad, or even worse, is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an automobile.

Unluckily, it is difficult for the American mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. The number of persons so afflicted is far greater than the records of the Patent Office show, for beyond the circle of frankly insane enterprise there lie circles of more and more plausible enterprise, and finally we come to a circle which embraces the great majority of human beings. These are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world, the believers in men, ideas and things. It is the settled habit of such folk to give ear to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass. A caressing confidence—but one, unfortunately, that is not borne out by human experience. The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization today than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near tomorrow. Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning; plans for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation today; and yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us until the angels get tired of the show, and the whole earth is set off like a gigantic bomb, or drowned, like a sick cat, between two buckets...

 

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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.

-H. L. Mencken
The American Mercury
May, 1930

 

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The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups. The business of victimizing them is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has its masters and its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, i.e., a licensed blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then, raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to it. There are no legal or other bars to the free functioning of their will, once it emerges into consciousness, save only such bars as they themselves have erected, and these they may remove whenever they so desire. …

… They know what they want when they actually want it, and if they want it badly enough they get it. What they want principally are safety and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to sacrifice everything else in order to get them. The science of politics under democracy consists in trading with them, i.e., in hoodwinking and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants, and what the enterprising minorities behind him want. The bargaining is conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with music by the choir, but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of a mule. It lies quite outside the bounds of honour, and even of common decency. It is a combat between jackals and jackasses. It is the master transaction of democratic states.

-H. L. Mencken
Notes On Democracy
New York, 1926.

 

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

-H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
New York, N.Y. 1949.

 

[Byron In Exile]

-H. L. Mencken
Notes On Democracy
New York, 1926.

Oh, this needs more attention.

 

[Saint Peter]

Oh, this needs more attention.

Why is that?

 

[Byron In Exile]

Why is that?

Did you read it?

 

[Saint Peter]

Did you read it?

No. Sorry.

Ish told me to study my history so I am reading Thermodynamics.

 

[Byron In Exile]

No. Sorry.

Ish told me to study my history so I am reading Thermodynamics.

Well, I can't explain why if you didn't read it.

On the other hand, if ishmael told you to study history, why aren't you reading Babylonian inscriptions?

 

[Saint Peter]

Well, I can't explain why if you didn't read it.

On the other hand, if ishmael told you to study history, why aren't you reading Babylonian inscriptions?

We can only share the simple things in life. Home audio, nachos, maybe an old car story here or there.

Babylonian inscriptions? Fuck that! Thermodynamics is The Way. You cannot go anywhere in life without it.

 

[Byron In Exile]

We can only share the simple things in life. Home audio, nachos, maybe an old car story here or there.

Babylonian inscriptions? Fuck that! Thermodynamics is The Way. You cannot go anywhere in life without it.

If you can't enjoy Mencken, you'll never get anywhere with Thermodynamics.

Better to stick with nachos and car stories.

And some killer home audio, it your budget allows for that...

 

[Saint Peter]

If you can't enjoy Mencken, you'll never get anywhere with Thermodynamics.

Better to stick with nachos and car stories.

And some killer home audio, it your budget allows for that...

I get along fine with Thermodynamics, Mencken or not.

And the home audio is killer enough, for now. I know it does not meet you high expectations of what killer home audio is. I will carry the sin.

 

[Byron In Exile]

And the home audio is killer enough, for now. I know it does not meet you high expectations of what killer home audio is. I will carry the sin.

No worries.

You will eventually catch the urge to explore, and find the undiscovered country.

 

[trysail]

Finally! It's been a long time coming ( there were copyright issues that had to be resolved ) but The Library of America has, at last, published a portion of Mencken's oeuvre. I'll put in a plug for The Library of America— these are gorgeous editions with sewn bindings printed on acid-free paper, available with slipcovers. They are a nice size, intended to be held comfortably in one hand.

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=331

... H. L. Mencken was unquestionably the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. The six volumes of Prejudices, published between 1919 and 1927, were both a slashing attack on what Mencken saw as American provincialism and hypocrisy and a resounding defense of the writers and thinkers he thought of as harbingers of a new frankness and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken’s prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller-coaster ride through a staggering range of themes: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink.

In this and a companion volume, The Library of America presents all six series of Prejudices in their original form. The first three series include some of his most famous writing, including “The Sahara of the Bozart,” an attack on Southern culture so unbridled as to earn him widespread criticism from politicians and the press; “The National Letters,” a lively and free-spoken survey of writing in America; “The Dry Millennium,” an analysis of the multiple absurdities of Prohibition; “Exeunt Omnes,” an unblinking and deromanticized contemplation of death; and “On Being an American,” a humorous celebration of the political and cultural panorama that he saw as “incomparably the greatest show on earth.” Here are his harsh summing-up of Theodore Roosevelt’s career (“he didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government”) and his sympathetic portraits of literary friends like James Huneker and George Jean Nathan. Mencken’s account of the original reception of Prejudices, from his memoir My Life as Editor and Author, is included as an appendix.

Edmund Wilson wrote: “Mencken’s mind . . . has all the courage in the world in a country where courage is rare.” That courage may sometimes have been coupled with an inflexible stubbornness that led him into positions hard to defend. But to succeeding generations of writers and readers, Mencken was the figure who had risked charges of heresy and sedition and almost single-handedly brought America into a new cultural era. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a critic of vast curiosity and vivacious frankness.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, volume editor, is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast and editor of Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters and The Impossible H. L. Mencken.

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=331

“Mencken has done more for the national letters than any man alive.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Transcript of Marion Elizabeth Rogers interview:
http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/LOA_Rodgers_on_Mencken.pdf

The final three series show Mencken at his lacerating best, taking on targets from religious fundamentalism to the dismal state of higher education. Included are such famous essays as “The Hills of Zion,” his report on the local atmosphere surrounding the Scopes trial in 1925; “In Memoriam: W.J.B.,” his relentless postmortem on William Jennings Bryan; “The Fringes of Lovely Letters,” a hilarious delineation of the lower and outer reaches of the literary world; “Comstockery,” a devastating account of the anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock (“A good woman, to him, was simply one who was efficiently policed”); and “On Living in Baltimore,” a celebration of his beloved native city.

Mencken was a man of strong enthusiasms and even stronger antipathies, expressed in a prose style that marshaled all the resources of the American language in a rich blend of comic invention and sarcastic fury. To read Prejudices is to embark on an exploration of many curious byways of American culture in a moment of tumultuous and often combative transition. Mencken never shied from combat, and the courage with which he confronted the entrenched truisms and hypocrisies of his time made him a uniquely liberating force in American letters.

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=332

http://www.loa.org/images/volumecovers/153x195/1598530755.jpg​

 

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Der Tag​

Mencken Day
September 11, 2010


Mencken Day 2010 will commence at 10:00 AM on September 11, 2010 at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St, Baltimore, MD. The Mencken Society’s Annual Meeting begins at 10:30 in the Wheeler Auditorium.

The Society’s speakers (in the morning) are Marion Rodgers, who will speak on her recent (hot off the presses) two-volume set of Mencken’s Prejudices, published by the Library of America, and David Donovan of the Enoch Pratt Free Library who has done heroic work in exhuming the entombed collection of Saturday Night Club material held by the Library. He will play selections from a recording of the Concert Artists of Baltimore’s concert, “A Saturday Night Club on Sunday Afternoon”, held April 11, 2010. If you missed the concert, here is your chance to at least get a taste of what was.

The Mencken Memorial speaker (in the afternoon) is Jonathan Yardley, book reviewer for the Washington Post and editor of Mencken’s My Life as Author and Editor (Knopf, 1993).



http://www.mencken.org/

 

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"You May Be Right"
By Stephen Budiansky

Outraged readers who wrote to H. L. Mencken would receive in reply a preprinted card:

Dear Sir or Madam:
You may be right.
Yours sincerely,
H. L. Mencken​

( I have also seen this story attributed to Mark Twain, Alexander Woollcott, Edward R. Murrow, and several other controversialists but it rings truest for Mencken. )

Mencken was serenely unconcerned by criticism and free of the thin-skinned compulsion to defend himself; after all, his whole raison d'etre was to be provocative, and he was hardly going to take umbrage that he had succeeded in provoking people. As he wrote a friend, his brand of opinionated journalism "must be done boldly, and, in order to get a crowd, a bit cruelly."

But like most people who have had the experience of covering politics and public affairs up close, Mencken also had a finely honed sense of what his biographer William Manchester perfectly captured in the phrase "tolerant misanthropy." An early lesson I learned in journalism was the limitless capacity of the human mind for sincere self-delusion. There are of course totally cynical charlatans, frauds, demagogues, and quacks, but they are actually exceedingly rare. In my time as a science writer I became quite interested in the phenomenon of medical quackery, and I interviewed a good many quacks who peddled worthless, dangerous, and unconscionable "alternative" treatments in crassly lucrative schemes. But I never encountered one who I ever doubted was absolutely and sincerely convinced of the truth and virtuousness of his metier...


Read more: http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2010/09/you-may-be-right.html#ixzz0yxFdRzRJ

 

[Byron In Exile]

Mencken was serenely unconcerned by criticism and free of the thin-skinned compulsion to defend himself; after all, his whole raison d'etre was to be provocative, and he was hardly going to take umbrage that he had succeeded in provoking people. As he wrote a friend, his brand of opinionated journalism "must be done boldly, and, in order to get a crowd, a bit cruelly."

But like most people who have had the experience of covering politics and public affairs up close, Mencken also had a finely honed sense of what his biographer William Manchester perfectly captured in the phrase "tolerant misanthropy." An early lesson I learned in journalism was the limitless capacity of the human mind for sincere self-delusion. There are of course totally cynical charlatans, frauds, demagogues, and quacks, but they are actually exceedingly rare. In my time as a science writer I became quite interested in the phenomenon of medical quackery, and I interviewed a good many quacks who peddled worthless, dangerous, and unconscionable "alternative" treatments in crassly lucrative schemes. But I never encountered one who I ever doubted was absolutely and sincerely convinced of the truth and virtuousness of his metier...

Great quote, thanks!

"Tolerant misanthropy" — perfect!

 

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Excerpted from:

MENCKENIANA, A Schimpflexikon
Expurgated Edition
New York, New York 1928.

NOTE​

This collection is not exhaustive, but an effort has been made to keep it representative. The original materials would fill many volumes: they include hundreds of savage articles and newspaper editorials, and a number of whole pamphlets. During the single year 1926 more than 500 separate editorials upon the sayings and doings of Mr. Mencken were printed in the United States, and at least four-fifths of them were unfavorable. Himself given to somewhat acidulous utterance, he has probably been denounced more vigorously and at greater length than any other American of his time, not even excepting Henry Ford, Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Here there is room only to offer some salient specimens of this anti-Mencken invective— mainly single sentences or phrases, torn from their incandescent context. Some were chosen for their wit— for there are palpable hits among them!—, some for their blistering ferocity, and some for their charming idiocy. The rest of the material awaits the literary resurrection men of another and perhaps less indignant day.
-THE PUBLISHER

Chapters

• Zoölogical
  "This maggot, this ghoul of new-made graves, this buzzard!"
  -Eugene L. Pearce, in the Tampa Times.
  
• Genealogical
  "Mr. Mencken did not degenerate from an ape, but from an ass. And in the process of 'revolution' the tail was eliminated, the ears became shorter and the hind parts smaller; but the ability to bray was increased, intensified, amplified and otherwise assified about one million times."
  - J. B. Tedder, in the Chattanooga News.
  
• Pathological
  "H. L. Mencken says the Liberty Bell episode was a myth. That man just naturally can't stand for anything that is more cracked than he is himself."
  - The Los Angeles Record
  
• Freudian Diagnosis
  "Mr. Mencken, that American Loud-Speaker, is suffering from a serious superiority complex."
  - The Queen ( London ).
  
• Penalogical
  "Mencken, with his filthy verbal hemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnably dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottomost pit of Hell."
  - The Jackson ( Miss. ) News.
  
• As A Critic
  "Mr. Mencken is a typical Hun in his criticism."
  - The Los Angeles Times.
  
• As An Artist
  "Mr. Mencken is no writer at all, but a brick factory."
  - The New Republic.
  
• As An Evangelist
  "Mencken is frankly a diabolist."
  - The Manchester ( N.H. ) Union.
  
• As An American
  "A British toady."
  - The Lowell ( Mass. ) Sun.
  
• As An Intellectual
  "In his glorious upward progress he acquired instead of the gray matter placed in the skulls of Tennesseans by the Almighty, a composite of slime, mould, bunk, miasma, decay, skunk cabbage, devil's snuff, flapdoodle and Hamburger cheese, blended in minor proportions with razor extract, stump water and valerian. So biggon, sooey, scat, shoo!"
  - Nannie H. Chesnutt, in the Nashville Tennessean.
  
• As A Journalist
  "H. L. Mencken thinks journalism is in a low estate. It sure is wherever Mencken touches it."
  - The Council Bluffs ( Iowa ) Nonpareil.
  
• As A Truth-Seeker
  
• As An Editor
  
• As A Statesman
  "A radical crack-brain."
  - The Huntington ( W. Va. ) Herald-Dispatch.
  
• As A Voluptuary
  "The Menckens are accustomed to trafficking in morasses of racy French literature. They have attained that peak of rarefied highbrowism where the palate quickens only upon highly-seasoned eroticism."
  - The Louisville Courier-Journal.
  
• As A Scoundrel
  
• Kosher Or Terefah?
  "Mencken is connected with the New York World, the attitude of which toward Romanism and Rum the reader should know full well. From his name, he seems to be a Jew, or at least a German, and recently in an Alabama daily he was sneering at Genesis.
  - The Alabama Christian Advocate.
  
• Ex-Cathedra
  "One H. L. Mencken, whose name sounds like that of a German, Polish or Russian Jew, said to be foreign-born and a product of the schools of Germany, has sneeringly called the South the Bible Belt."
  - THE REV. JAMES M. GLENN, D.D., in the Birmingham ( Ala. ) Christian Advocate.
  
• Counter-Offensive
  "I do not believe that all the iconoclastic mouthings of H. L. Mencken can weigh as feathers against the gold of a single, little, undernourished, underprivileged or crippled child, made happier by the work of the Lions."
  - PROFESSOR ENEST C. MARRINER, of Colby College, Waterville, Maine.
  
• Winces Of The Called
  
• The Voice Of The Motherland
  
• Miscellaneous Elegancies
  "H. L. Mencken, instead of taking a page ad like the piles cure manufacturers or the fly paper venders or the corn plaster makers, simply says something sufficiently shocking or silly to be quoted."
  - The Nashville Tennessean
  
• Verdicts In Brief
  "A SMART Aleck who has become a member of Phi Beta Kappa."
  - Hearst's Chicago Herald-Examiner.
  
  "A Baltimore Babbitt."
  - O. O. McINTYRE
  

Soli Deo gloria!


​

 

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Mencken has done more for the national letters than any man alive.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald​

 

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http://www.mencken.org/text/txt003/Mencken.H_L.1924.The_National_Hymn.html


The National Hymn
by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan

[From “Clinical Notes”, The American Mercury 3(11):314-317 (1924-11)]

The National Hymn.–The pacifist, when all other devices fail them, attack “Star-Spangled Banner.” This great choral, they argue, is full of brimstone and braggadocio—a direct incitement to militarism. It depicts the Republic as the land of the free and the home of the brave, and so arouses a truculent and bombastic spirit. One of the principal exponents of this View is a lady Christian Scientist of great wealth. She takes whole pages in the New York papers to advocate the adoption of a more modest and temperate national anthem—something, say, on the order of “Lead, Kindly Light” or “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Her position, it seems to me, is very unsound; I suspect, indeed, that she has never read “The Star-Spangled Banner.” If she were familiar with its text she would know that it is not bombastic at all, but very moderate and even timorous. The first stanza, which is all that anyone ever hears, actually ends with a question mark. The poet is not at all sure that the Republic will survive. He sees it beset by formidable enemies and is in obvious doubt. All he says directly is that it would be a pity for so meritorious a nation to come to grief. It is loving fear for it rather than boastful pride in it that makes him call it the land of the free and the home of the brave. His phrase is a device of rhetoric, like that employed by a curb broker or university president when he calls Dr. Coolidge a great man.

Of the other three stanzas only one shows anything properly describable as a bellicose spirit, and that is the second. It is devoted mainly to reviling the enemy. Well, why not? That enemy, when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written, had but lately Captured Washington, burned the Capitol, and driven the President and Congress to the woods of Rock Creek. When I was a boy, before the Sulgrave Foundation had got into action, the tale of its atrocities was still in all the school-books. Every American youth of the 80’s was taught to hate the Huns of 1814. That Francis Scott Key did so is certainly not to be wondered at, for despite his professional immunity as a poet he had been seized bodily, carried to the fleet of the Potsdam tyrant, and there exposed to the musket and shell fire of his own people. Yet notwithstanding this gross provocation he devoted but one of his four stanzas to billingsgate. Of the others, one, as I have said, ends with a question mark. The remaining two are even milder. One is mere prosodic burbling: a stanza almost devoid of logical content. The other is full of discreet ifs. If “our cause is just”—“then conquer we must.” If we continue to trust in God, all will be well. But not, apparently, otherwise.

All this leads to the inevitable conclusion that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not actually too raucous and boastful, as the pacifists allege, but too pianissimo. If it deserves censure at all, it is because it does discredit to a free and proud people by representing them as too mild and hesitant. “lf our cause is just,” forsooth! Our cause is always just ipso facto. To question it, in these days of Ku Kluxes and American Legions, is far worse than to dodge serving it. The first duty of the American citizen is to assume that his country is never wrong; his second is to enforce that assumption upon all dissidents by brute force. It is, indeed, already a fixed principle of our jurisprudence that such dissidents have no rights—that it is competent for any citizen to have at them at sight, and without trial. As time passes, that doctrine, no doubt, will be extended. That is to say, it will begin to take in, not only national policies, but also the whole body of communal mores. It will then become unlawful, and punishable by death, to read Marx, Nietzsche or Darwin, just as it is already unlawful, and punishable by imprisonment, to use alcohol in the immemorial manner of civilized men.

What is needed is a national anthem to voice the new spirit of 100% Americanism, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” voiced the feeble hesitations and uncertainties of Key’s time. This anthem must be bare of all ifs and buts; it must be an exultation rather than a hymn; it must cover the whole glittering and inspiring spectacle of American national life; the national spirit must be in every line of it. Great talent must be thrown into its composition; its production will be no job for a common poetaster, with his pale emotions and his Greenwich Village theories. Great talent, indeed, has been thrown into its composition, for it already exists, words and music.

 

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Mencken, from:
The Writer's Almanac ( http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php )—

http://find.publicradio.org/search?...ntqr=3&entsp=0&oe=UTF-8&ud=1&sort=date:D:S:d1

 

[trysail]

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”​

-H.L. Mencken​

 

[VaticanAssassin]

I like Mencken, always have. But I am also a simple man, so give me the original; Twain. He said just as much, with out saying so much.......

 

[Ishmael]

I like Mencken, always have. But I am also a simple man, so give me the original; Twain. He said just as much, with out saying so much.......

Mencken can be succinct.

"All government, of course, is against liberty." - H. L. Mencken

Ishmael