Henry Louis Mencken citáty

strana 4

„Láska je vítězství fantazie nad inteligencí.“

„Člověk, který se umí smát, i když jen sám sobě, není nikdy opravdu nešťastný.“

„Lidský život je v podstatě komedie.“

„Filozof je slepec v temné místnosti, který hledá černou kočku, která tam není. Teolog je člověk, který ji najde.“

„Láska je jako válka. Snadno se začíná, ale těžce končí.“

„Cizoložství je aplikace demokracie na lásku.“

„Láska je přelud, že se jedna žena liší od druhé.“

„Láska je jako válka: je jednoduché ji začít, ale nesmírně náročné ji ukončit.“

„Muži jsou na tom líp než ženy. Zaprvé vstupují do manželství později, za druhé dřív umírají.“

„Když se ženy líbají, musím vždy myslet na boxery, kteří si podávají ruce před utkáním.“

„Jediní opravdu šťastní lidé jsou vdané ženy a svobodní muži.“

„Až pocit odpovědnosti člověka mučí, zároveň ho žene, aby dosáhl nemožné.“

„Ženy nenávidí revoluci a revolucionáře. Mají rády muže poddajné, kteří jsou vážení v bance a nechodí nikdy pozdě k obědu.“

„Každý problém má své řešení, které je prosté, jasné a mylné.“

„Demagog je člověk, který káže doktrínu, o níž ví, že je špatná, lidem, o nichž ví, že jsou to hlupáci.“

„Dobrý politik je něco tak nemyslitelného jako čestný lupič.“

„Každý normální muž musí být čas od času v pokušení plivnout si do dlaní, vyvěsit černý prapor a dát se do podřezávání krků.“

„Svědomí je vnitřní hlas, který nás upozorňuje, že se někdo dívá.“

„Každý považuje své příbuzné za groteskní karikatury své osoby.“

„Život je boj, ne však proti hříchu, ani proti síle peněz, ani proti zlovolnému živočišnému magnetizmu, ale proti vodíkovým iontům.“

“We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.”

“Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

“Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”

“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…The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

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

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”

“the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.”

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”

“Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”

“Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

“No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”

“The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.”

“In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”

“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”

“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”

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

“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.”

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”