H. L. Mencken Quotes About Literature
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A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
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Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
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The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.
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Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.
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The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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