Frases de Henry Louis Mencken

página 8

“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.”

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

“A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.”

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

“Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.”

“Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.”

“The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.”

“Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.”

“I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.”

“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

“Though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck—that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus.”

“Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”

“Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.”

“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

“Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.”

“A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.”

“The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.”

“The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man."… The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln… He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.”

“The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”

“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

“The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.”

“It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

“When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.”

“[Roosevelt] was always… finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense, and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor.”

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

“Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? … it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. … I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?”

“The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.”

“This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.”