Sententiæ
Mencken and George Jean Nathan, his co-editor at The Smart Set, were well known for the numerous short epigrams that were a fixture of that magazine. The sayings were so popular they were featured in movie theaters as trailers before the main feature started. He remains ever quoteable. Here are a few of my favorites, many from A Mencken Chrestomathy, an excellent collection of Mencken's best writing, as selected by himself:
- Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
- Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
- Nature abhors a moron.
- Courtroom - A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
- Lawyer - One who protects us from robbers by taking away the temptation.
- Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
- It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
- Dachshund - A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.
- A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phase makes it, feminine intuition.
- No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Notes on journalism, Chicago Tribune, [19 September 1926]
- He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
- A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know.
- Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.
- Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
- Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
- 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.
- The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing - that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
- Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
- A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
- Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
- Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
- Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
- Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
- I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.
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