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Your Quotes for 12 September 2005 - Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken was born at Baltimore on this day in 1880. The son of a cigar merchant, he worked for his father's company but gave it up for journalism when his father died, although he never gave up cigars. His clear wording, insight, and wit puts him in the same class with Shaw and Voltaire, and for the same reasons I've saved a lot of his quotes.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

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.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
     - All from Henry Louis Mencken, 1880 - 1956

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