For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
¶ "The Divine Afflatus," New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917)
Reprinted in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy, ch. 25 (1949)
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.
¶ A Little Book in C Major (1916)
He later changed this to “... concludes that it will also make better soup.” (A Book of Burlesques (1924))
It is hard to believe that a man is telling you the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place.
¶ 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)
CREATOR: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
¶ A Mencken Chrestomathy, ch. 30 (1949)
Sometimes attributed to Voltaire.
What should be obvious and indisputable requires a public ceremonial to prove it! Why not a day for wearing little tin bathtubs to prove that one bathes, in the patriotic American manner, once a week? Why not white hatbands for gentlemen who are true to their wives? It is precisely the mark of the cad that he makes a public boast of what is inseparable from decency. He is the fellow who marches grandly in preparedness parades to show off his valor, his patriotism, his willingness to die for his country. He is the fellow who insults his mother by making a spectacle of the fact that he is on good terms with her.
¶ Baltimore Evening Sun (13 Jun. 1916)
(on Mothers Day and wearing carnations to proclaim love for one's mother)
We owe to capital the fact that the medical profession, for example, is now really useful to mankind, whereas formerly it was useful only to the charlatans who practiced it. It took accumulated money to provide the long training that medicine began to demand as it slowly lifted itself from the level of a sorry trade to that of a dignified art and science -- money to keep the student while he studied and his teachers while they instructed him, and more money to pay for the expensive housing and materials that they needed. In the main, all that money came from private capitalists. But whether it came from private capitalists or from the common treasury, it was always capital, which is to say, it was always part of an accumulated surplus. It never could have been provided out of the hand-to-mouth income of a non-capitalistic society.
¶ Baltimore Evening Sun (14-Jan-1935)
The most a lawyer ever demands of the victim before him is that he be hanged, but the meekest clergyman is constantly proposing to doom his opponents to endless tortures in lakes of boiling brimstone.
¶ Baltimore Evening Sun (17 Dec. 1927)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety.
¶ In Defense of Women (1923)
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
¶ Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
¶ Smart Set (August 1919)
We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only great, but also a man: that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of steaks.
¶ The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. 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 chiropractic, astrology or cannibalism.
¶ “The Library,” The American Mercury (May 1930)
Book review of The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (1930)
