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. . . .In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen . . . I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.
H.L. MenckenTags: liberty
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
H.L. MenckenTags: democracy public-opinion gullibility
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
H.L. MenckenI am, indeed, against all proselyters, whether they be on my side or on some other side. What moves nine-tenths of them, I believe, is simply the certainty of the result that I have just mentioned. Their lofty pretensions are all tosh. The thing they yearn for is the satisfaction of making someone unhappy: that yearning is almost as universal among them as thirst is in dry Congressmen.
H.L. MenckenTags: religion
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
H.L. MenckenFor the Bible, despite all its contradictions and absurdities, its barbarisms and obscenities, remains grand and gaudy stuff, and so it deserves careful study and enlightened exposition. It is not only lovely in phrase; it is also rich in ideas, many of them far from foolish. One somehow gathers the notion that it was written from end to end by honest men—inspired, perhaps, but nevertheless honest. When they had anything to say they said it plainly, whether it was counsel that enemies be slain or counsel that enemies be kissed. They knew how to tell a story, and how to sing a song, and how to swathe a dubious argument in specious and disarming words.
H.L. MenckenTags: religion
For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.
H.L. MenckenTags: religion
The effort to put down Christian Science by law is one of the craziest enterprises upon which medical men waste their energies. It is based upon a superstition even sillier than that behind Christian Science itself: to wit, the superstition that, when an evil shows itself, all that is needed to dispose of it is to pass a law against it.
H.L. MenckenThe Fathers of the Republic, I believe, were far cleverer fellows than they are commonly represented to be, even in the schoolbooks. If it was not divine inspiration that moved them, then they must have drunk better liquor than is now obtainable on earth. For when they made religion a free-for-all, they prepared the way for making it ridiculous; and when they opened the doors of office to the mob, they disposed forever of the delusion that government is a solemn and noble thing, by wisdom out of altruism.
H.L. MenckenTags: religion
Children born to-day may see the beginnings of a genuine state church in the Republic, with a hierarchy of live wires and a purely American theology. I regret that I am too old to wait for it, for if it comes it will be a lulu.
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