Paraphrase Of Mencken Quotes

You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public ~ Scott Adams

I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday ... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. ~ H.L. Mencken

When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God.

Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks ~ H.L. Mencken

People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect. ~ H.L. Mencken

Osteopath
One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it. ~ H.L. Mencken

To paraphrase Karl Marx, the great Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the streets of Copenhagen ... Capitalism is the specter, almost nobody wants to mention it ... Socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke about, which walks here too, rather it is like a counter-specter. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don't have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world. ~ Hugo Chavez

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself. ~ H.L. Mencken

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen. ~ H.L. Mencken

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up. ~ H.L. Mencken

The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began; ~ H.L. Mencken

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. ~ H.L. Mencken

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman. ~ H.L. Mencken

We could paraphrase "repent and believe" with "close your ears and listen." Obedience has both a stop and start to it. We turn our backs to the old voices and offer our attention to Jesus' voice.

We desire for God's voice to crescendo in our lives, with the competing voices fading away. This means that we must ruthlessly silence the calls of other masters. We confess our auditory rebellions to others, since somehow moving the jaw in confession seems to unplug our ears. ~ Adam S. McHugh

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous. ~ H.L. Mencken

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a vast fortune must be in want of a newer, younger wife. ~ Bruce Feirstein

I think there is a limit beyond which free speech can't go….a limit that is very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy… I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I have the right to say and to believe anything I please, but I don't have the right to press it on anybody else. For example, take for instance the Catholic Church, which I am on good terms with, personally, but which I have no belief in whatsoever. I have a right to print my dissent from its doctrines, to utter them. I have exercised that right for many years. But I have no right to go on the cathedral steps on Sunday morning, when the Catholics are coming out from High Mass, and make a speech denouncing them. I don't think there is any such right. Nobody has got the right to be a nuisance to his neighbors, or to hurt his neighbor's feelings wantonly. If they come to him and say "What do you think of this Mass that we have just finished?", I think that he has the right to answer. But he has no right to press his opinions on them. Of course you'll notice the peculiar thing about the United States, where there is very little free speech. Free speech is a very limited right, in this country, as I have learned to my bitter experience, more than once. Yet, it is the country where the right to press opinions on reluctant hearers is carried to a development that is unheard of on earth. The whole country's full of propagandists who are bothering ev ~ H.L. Mencken

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not. ~ H.L. Mencken

The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure ... A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously. ~ H.L. Mencken

Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian. ~ H.L. Mencken

Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. ~ H.L. Mencken

There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music. ~ H.L. Mencken

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly
too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System
the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse. ~ James Thurber

All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others. ~ H.L. Mencken

The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth inthe fairgrounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the Liberals. ~ H.L. Mencken

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished. ~ H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. H. L. MENCKEN ~ Frank Luntz

What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells. ~ H.L. Mencken

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes. ~ H.L. Mencken

To paraphrase the philosopher Nietzsche, he who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how. I've found that 20 percent of any change is knowing how; but 80 percent is knowing why. If we gather a set of strong enough reasons to change, we can change in a minute something we've failed to change for years. ~ Tony Robbins

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites? ~ H.L. Mencken

Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy.. a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. ~ H.L. Mencken

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice. ~ H.L. Mencken

Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment. ~ H.L. Mencken