Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
H.L. MenckenCivilization, in fact, grows 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 an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.
H.L. MenckenTags: politics
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H.L. MenckenTags: writing
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
H.L. MenckenTags: romance
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.
H.L. MenckenTags: politics
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H.L. MenckenHappiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
H.L. MenckenEvery decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H.L. MenckenTags: government
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. MenckenTags: fear happiness definitions attitude orthodoxy puritanism strictness
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H.L. MenckenTags: politics propaganda
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