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February 01, 2005
H. L. Mencken
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
"In every politician there are hopes of a Hitler."
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."
"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favour of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
"I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind."
"It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all."
"It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it."
"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organisation, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
"The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all. This ideal, I believe, will be realised in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes and taken up my public duties in Hell."
"[Politicians] are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged. It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability. But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.
Those problems demand for their solution – when they are soluble at all, which is not often – a high degree of technical proficiency, and with it there should go an adamantine kind of integrity, for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamour girl or a dipsomaniac. But we train a man for facing them, not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump. If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense. Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them – that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell. The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache."
"Votes are collared under democracy not by talking sense but by talking nonsense."
"Democracy, like Puritanism is immovably grounded upon the inferior man's hatred of the man who is having a better time."
"The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really full of rectitude and wisdom. This is the origin of the doctrine that, whatever its transient errors, democracy always comes to the right decisions in the long run."
"One of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true – and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all the ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. Democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things."
"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing."
"No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence… They must get at such men through their feelings or resign getting at them altogether."
"I have often pointed out how politics, under democracy, invariably translates itself from the domain of logical ideas to the domain of mere feelings, usually simple fear – how every great campaign in American history, however decorously it started with a statement of principles, has always ended with a violent pursuit of hobgoblins."
[On politicians] "They have to abase themselves in order to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it."
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage."
"The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic."
"Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven."
Posted by pauldavies on February 01, 2005
