The Allen Almanac

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on H.L. Menken today (inspiration for the title of the blog Mallard Fillmore’s Bathtub among many other things) and I thought I’d just post a few of my favorite quotations of his.

• A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
• A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
• A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
• All government, of course, is against liberty.
• All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
• Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

• For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
• Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
• I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
• I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
• In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
• It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
• Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
• Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
• No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
• After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

And my favorite, written in 1920:

• The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

  The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

If you can stand anymore of them, here is a whole page of M.L. Mencken quotes.