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 successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.”

“How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows -- because nothing is easier than to fool them -- because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands.”

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.”

“It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”

“I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!”

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

“Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.”

“Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?”

“The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.”

“When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”

“Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.”

“My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world.”

“I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”

“I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a [government] jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital — or his chief heir, in case he has perished — goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.”

“[Paul Patterson and I] soon got on the subject of the war, and I said flatly that I thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and absurd, but also not a little disingenuous. It had gone over to the English in an abject and ignominious fashion, against all reason and all the obvious facts. Worse, it had yielded supinely to the most outrageous fiats of the Roosevelt censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson somewhat, for he likes to think of himself as a news editor, and he insisted that in handling the war news the Sun had done good work.”

“Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.”

“When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.”

“What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”

“It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.”

“To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.”

“Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.”

“Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.”

“To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States.”

“The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.”

“Nature abhors a moron.”

“When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever. I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. ”

“All government, of course, is against liberty.”