Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority… The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”
Henry Louis Mencken Quotes
Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. He can imagine and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty – for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously […]
By an inferior man I mean one who knows nothing that is not known to every adult, who can do nothing that could not be learned by anyone in a few weeks, and who meanly admires mean things.
Having lived all my life in a country swarming with messiahs, I have been mistaken, perhaps quite naturally, for one myself, especially by the others. It would be hard to imagine anything more preposterous. I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as […]
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn.
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.
Unluckily for the man of tender mind, he is quite incapable of any such easy dismissal of the great plagues and conundrums of existence. It is of the essence of his character that he is too sensitive and sentimental to put them ruthlessly out of his mind: he cannot view even the crunching of a […]
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.
