Frases de Henry Louis Mencken

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“Vive de manera que puedas mirar fijamente a los ojos de cualquiera y mandarlo al diablo.”

“Democracia: el arte de manejar el circo desde la jaula de los simios.”

“En resumen: 1) El cosmos es una rueda de la fortuna gigante dando 10 000 revoluciones por minuto. 2) El hombre es una mosca mareada dando un paseo en esa rueda. 3) La religión es la teoría de que la rueda fue diseñada y puesta en marcha para darle el paseo.”

“Es imposible imaginar el universo manejado por un sabio, justo y omnipotente Dios, pero es muy fácil imaginarlo administrado por un consejo de dioses. Si ese consejo en verdad existe, opera precisamente como el consejo de una corporación que está perdiendo dinero.”

“La conciencia es una voz interior que nos advierte que alguien puede estar mirando.”

“Cuando oigas a un hombre hablar de su amor por la patria, es signo de que espera que le paguen por eso.”

“Cae la cabeza del rey, y la tiranía se vuelve libertad. El cambio parece abismal. Luego, pedazo a pedazo, la cara de la libertad se endurece, y poco a poco se vuelve la misma vieja cara de la tiranía. Después, otro ciclo, y luego otro más. Pero bajo el juego de todos estos opuestos hay algo fundamental y permanente: la ilusión básica de que el hombre puede ser gobernado y al mismo tiempo ser libre.”

“El hombre se hace civilizado no en proporción a su disposición para creer, sino en proporción a su facilidad para dudar.”

“Misógino: hombre que odia a la mujer tanto como las mujeres se odian entre sí.”

“Todo gobierno es, en su esencia, una conspiración contra el hombre superior: su único objetivo permanente es oprimirlo y malograrlo. Si es aristocrático en organización, entonces busca proteger al hombre que es superior ante la ley contra el hombre que es superior ante los hechos; si es democrático, entonces busca proteger al hombre que es inferior en todo contra ambos. Una de sus funciones primarias es regir a los hombres por la fuerza, para hacerlos tan iguales como sea posible y tan dependientes uno del otro como sea posible, para buscar y combatir la originalidad entre ellos. Todo lo que puede ver en una idea original es un cambio potencial, y por tanto una invasión a sus prerrogativas. El hombre más peligroso para cualquier gobierno es el hombre que tiene la habilidad de pensar las cosas por si mismo, sin que le importen las supersticiones o tabúes. Casi inevitablemente llega a la conclusión de que el gobierno bajo el cual vive es deshonesto, loco e intolerable, y así, si es un romántico, trata de cambiarlo. E incluso si no lo es, si es muy apto para extender el descontento entre quienes lo son.”

“Qué es una campaña política sino un esfuerzo concentrado para quitar a un grupo de políticos que son malos, y poner a otros que se cree que son mejores. La primer conclusión, creo que siempre es atinada; la segunda, es ciertamente falsa. Porque, si la experiencia nos enseña algo, es esto: que un buen político, en la democracia, es tan impensable como un ladrón honesto.”

“Un idealista es alguien que, notando que las rosas huelen mejor que las coles, concluye que también harían mejor sopa.”

“Teología: esfuerzo de explicar lo que no se sabe, poniendolo en términos de no “ser digno” de saber.”

“Confianza: el sentimiento de poder creer a una persona, incluso cuando sabemos que en su lugar nosotros también mentiríamos.”

“A una persona naturalmente confiada le lleva bastante tiempo reconciliarse con la idea de que, después de todo, Dios no lo ayudará.”

“Cuando 'A' molesta o hiere a 'B' con el pretexto de salvar o mejorar 'X', 'A' es un sinvergüenza.”

“Cuando dos mujeres se besan, siempre recuerdan a los boxeadores profesionales cuando se estrechan las manos.”

“De todos los mecanismos de escape, la muerte es el más eficiente.”

“El New Deal empezó —como el ejército de Salvación— prometiendo la salvación de la humanidad. Pero terminó —como el ejército de Salvación— abriendo tiendas de compra y venta y perturbando la paz.”

“El soltero desea una esposa pero se alegra de no tenerla.”

“Es completamente lícito para una católica evitar el embarazo recurriendo a las matemáticas, aunque todavía está prohibido recurrir a la física o a la química.”

“Hay una solución fácil para todo problema humano: clara, plausible y equivocada.”

“La fe puede ser brevemente definida como la creencia ilógica en la ocurrencia de lo improbable.”

“La naturaleza aborrece a un tonto.”

“Los solteros saben más acerca de las mujeres que los casados; si no fuese así, ellos también lo estarían.”

“Remordimiento: arrepentimiento de haber esperado tanto para hacer algo.”

“Auto respeto: El sentimiento de seguridad de que nadie, hasta ahora, sospecha nada.”

“Verdad: Algo que de alguna manera desacredita a alguien.”

“Juez — Un estudiante de leyes que corrige sus propios exámenes.”

“Jurado — Un grupo de doce personas quienes, habiendo mentido al juez respecto a su oído, salud y compromisos laborales, han fallado en engañarlo.”

“Abogado: Alguien que nos protege de los ladrones retirando la tentación.”

“Envidia es la teoría de que alguien más tiene igual de poco gusto.”

“Riqueza — Cualquier salario que sea por lo menos $100 dólares más al año que el salario del marido de la hermana de nuestra esposa.”

“El hecho básico de la existencia humana es, no una tragedia, sino un aburrimiento. No es tanto una guerra más que un esperar en una fila de personas. La objeción hacia ella no es que sea predominantemente dolorosa sino que carece de sentido.”

“Juez: Un estudiante de leyes que corrige sus propios exámenes… y Jurado: Un grupo de doce personas quienes, habiendo mentido al juez respecto a su oído, salud y compromisos laborales, han fallado en engañarlo.”

“El amor es como la guerra: fácil empezar, pero muy difícil parar.”

“All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.”

“The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.”

“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

“Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.”

“Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. […] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.”

“When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats.”

“No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.”

“I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

“Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.”

“Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

“Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.”

“Platitude — An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.”

“Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.”

“Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy—a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose.”

“Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion.”

“Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?”

“Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.”

“No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.”

“The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history… But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth". It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”

“One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.”

“If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.”

“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.”

“Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.”

“I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom... [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.”

“The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.”

“The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of mind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, of incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up at the first demand.”

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. 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."”

“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”

“Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.”