1. Citations
  2. Auteurs
  3. H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken citations
Page 8

Henry Louis Mencken , plus connu sous le nom de H. L. Mencken, est un journaliste, linguiste, satiriste, critique social et un libre penseur, surnommé « le sage de Baltimore » ou encore « le Nietzsche américain ». Il est souvent considéré comme l'un des écrivains américains les plus influents du XXe siècle. À une époque de sa carrière, les Américains l'avaient désigné comme leur plus brillant esprit et critique littéraire hors pair.

Mencken est probablement plus connu aujourd'hui pour son ouvrage The American Language, une étude de plusieurs volumes sur la façon dont l'anglais est parlé aux États-Unis, ainsi que pour son reportage satirique sur le procès Scopes, qu'il appelait le « procès du singe ». Wikipedia  

✵ 12. septembre 1880 – 29. janvier 1956
H. L. Mencken photo
H. L. Mencken: 282   citations 0   J'aime

H. L. Mencken Citations

“La convention sociale la plus curieuse de la formidable époque que nous vivons est celle selon laquelle les opinions religieuses doivent être respectées. L'évidence des effets pervers d'une telle idée doit être claire pour tout le monde. Tout ce qu'elle permet, c'est 1) de jeter un voile de sainteté sur ces opinions qui sont une complète violation de la décence intellectuelle, et 2) de transformer tout théologien en libertin patenté. […] En fait il n'y a rien dans les opinions religieuses qui justifie qu'elles dussent bénéficier de plus de respect que les autres. Au contraire elles ont tendance à être remarquablement stupide. […] Non, il n'y a rien de notable ni de digne dans les idées religieuses. Elles aboutissent pour la plupart à un tissu de non-sens particulièrement puéril et assommant.”

H. L. Mencken
idée , monde , Sens

H. L. Mencken: Citations en anglais

“Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

412
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

33
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

Des MacHale, Wit, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City (KS), 2003, ISBN 978-0-7407-3330-7, page 197 https://books.google.ca/books?id=Dhlgd_Af1C4C&pg=PA197
Misattributed

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

“The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

"The Incomparable Buzzsaw", The Smart Set, May 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=ySscAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+allurement+that+they+hold+out+to+men+is+precisely+the+allurement+that+Cape+Hatteras+holds+out+to+sailors+they+are+enormously+dangerous+and+hence+enormously+fascinating%22&pg=PA54#v=onepage; later published in Prejudices: Second Series, Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=0-A4AQAAMAAJ&q=%22The+allurement+that+they+hold+out+to+men+is+precisely+the+allurement+that+Cape+Hatteras+holds+out+to+sailors+they+are+enormously+dangerous+and+hence+enormously+fascinating%22&pg=PA236#v=onepage (1920)
1910s

“Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

298
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

April 1, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

“Though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck—that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

As quoted in LIFE magazine, Vol. 21, No. 6, (5 August 1946), p. 48 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3UwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&client=safari&pg=PA48#v=onepage&q&f=false
1940s–present

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken livre The American Language

The American Language (1919)

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

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

October 24, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

“The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man."… The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln… He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

April 13, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

“The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 1

“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

71
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken livre The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908/1913)
1900s

“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, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

68
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun (12 June 1922)
1920s

“[Roosevelt] was always… finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense, and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

April 15, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken livre Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods (1930; 2nd Edition 1946)
1930s

“Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? … it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. … I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

On "teachers of English" in "The Schoolmarm's Goal" in The Lower Depths (1925)
1920s

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

397
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.”

Help us translate this quote
H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist