H. L. Mencken Quotes

Her ashes are buried at the foot of the grave of my mother, and beside her there is room for mine. Thinking of her, I can well understand the great human yearning that makes for a belief in immortality, but I do not believe in it, and neither did she. We have parted forever, though my ashes will soon be mingling with hers. I’ll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all…We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end.

My belief is that every man after fifty-five is always ill more or less.

Thus, rhetorically at least, he lived life more dramatically than most other mortals, attempted more, risked more, said more, and said it more colorfully on a wider range of subjects than perhaps any other writer of his generation. The result, depending on what he came out with at any given time, was that he appeared to be both the best friend and the worst enemy of Jews, blacks, and numerous other segments of the population.
The truth is that a hundred statements could be chosen to “prove” Mencken anti-Semitic and a hundred to “prove” he was not.

As for younger writers, Mencken wrote a friend in 1935, “all…seem to be headed toward the left….The left-wing movement…is bound to be transient, but while it lasts it has pretty well killed intelligent criticism in this country. Books are judged not by their worth as works of art, but by their political content…”

For all his compassion for family and close friends he lacked a larger compassion, one that embraced people whom he did not know or care for personally.

He confronted the moment as he had faced all other painful moments, without the consolation of religion or philosophy. “I can well understand why the more naive sort of people cling to the hope of a reunion after death,” he wrote of that late May day. “But I do not share it.”

The matter of “right and wrong” was a subject in which he had long been interested. Indeed, it had been a deeply personal concern ever since, early in his career, he had detected a great distinction between morality and honor. “I have never met a thoroughly moral man who was honorable,” he had written in Prejudices, by which he had meant that fervently moral men would employ any means, including dishonorable ones, to achieve their ends.

My engagement to AP is off. Her husband made pedantic objections to it.

The God business is really quite simple. No sane man denies that the universe presents phenomena quite beyond human understanding, and so it is a fair assumption that they are directed by some understanding that is superhuman. But that is as far as sound thought can go. All religions pretend to go further. That is, they pretend to explain the unknowable….Anyone who pretends to say what God wants or doesn’t want, and what the whole show is about, is simply an ass.

They were common folk, and their commonness radiated from them like heat from a stove….The wheelbarrow handle, it was plain, was more familiar to the men in that long line than the golf-stick, and the washtub had engaged the women far oftener than the lipstick.
But what of it? The klan is not a club for snobs, it is a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority.

There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell—and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.

In particular, he was receptive to black writers, without question more helpful than any other editor of his time. Both W.E.B. Du Bois and the poet Countee Cullen appeared in the Mercury’s pages during its first year, and in later issues poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes and future NAACP head Walter F. White were represented. Indeed, the black journalist George S. Schuyler, who contributed nine essays to the Mercury, was to appear more frequently in the magazine in the final six years of Mencken’s editorship than any other writer, white or black.

In matters of personality, he had more in common with Hemingway than either man acknowledged—not only a combative spirit and a devotion to the cult of masculinity but also an abhorrence of romanticism and a nearly compulsive desire for order. Mencken’s creed, stated later in his memoirs, is a close cousin of Hemingway’s own. “Competence, indeed,” Mencken was to write, “is my chief admiration…And next to competence I put what is called being a good soldier—that is, not whining.”

He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night….He had no ideas, but he was not a nuisance.

He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the lower classes, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republic from them. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.