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Frasi di Henry Louis Mencken
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Henry Louis Mencken è stato un giornalista e saggista statunitense, nonché curatore editoriale, conosciuto come il "Saggio di Baltimora", ed è noto soprattutto per la pungente satira della società puritana del suo Paese e per i suoi studi di linguistica, attività che lo hanno reso uno dei più influenti scrittori statunitensi della prima metà del XX secolo. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. Settembre 1880 – 29. Gennaio 1956
Henry Louis Mencken photo
Henry Louis Mencken: 302   frasi 7   Mi piace

Henry Louis Mencken frasi celebri

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“L'amore è come la guerra: facile da iniziare, ma molto difficile da interrompere.”

Henry Louis Mencken

“La democrazia è una forma di religione. È l'adorazione degli sciacalli da parte dei somari.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Citato in Le Formiche, § 1814

“Il fatto però che le minacce dell'inferno abbiano la loro utilità sociale non è un argomento a sostegno della verità della religione; è semplicemente un argomento a sfavore della specie umana.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

“La vera patria delle apocalissi e delle escatologie è l'India. Si sono inventati più paradisi e inferni qui, che in tutto il resto del mondo, e la loro influenza è visibile in tutte le teologie moderne.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

“Nessun uomo merita una fiducia illimitata – nei casi migliori, il suo tradimento è solo posposto nell'attesa di una tentazione sufficiente.”

Henry Louis Mencken

The Sceptic, da The Smart Set, maggio 1919

“Si deve certamente ammettere che la religione è una delle più grandi invenzioni che mai si siano avute sulla terra.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

Frasi sulla religione di Henry Louis Mencken

“La verità è che la teologia cristiana – come ogni altra teologia – non è soltanto contraria allo spirito scientifico, lo è anche ad ogni altro tentativo di pensiero razionale. […] L'unico vero modo per conciliare scienza e religione è di istituire qualcosa che non sia scienza e qualcosa che non sia religione.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

“La religione fu inventata dall'uomo, così come dall'uomo furono inventate l'agricoltura e la ruota, e in essa non v'è assolutamente nulla che giustifichi la credenza che i suoi inventori avessero l'ausilio di potenze più alte, terrene o d'altra natura. In alcuni suoi aspetti, essa è estremamente geniale, in altri di commovente bellezza, ma in altri ancora è così assurda da rasentare l'imbecillità.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

“La cosa principale è che il cristianesimo, sola fra le religioni del mondo moderno, ha ereditato un opulento contenuto estetico, ed è pertanto esso stesso un'opera d'arte. La forza di umana attrattiva di tutta questa poesia è così potente che promette di sopravvivere alla decadenza del cristianesimo.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

“È giusto rispettare la religione degli altri, ma solo nel senso e nella misura in cui si rispetta la loro convinzione di avere una moglie bella e dei figli intelligenti.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

Henry Louis Mencken Frasi e Citazioni

“Qualsiasi persona normale di tanto in tanto prova la tentazione di sputarsi nelle mani, issare la bandiera nera e cominciare a tagliare le gole.”

Henry Louis Mencken
Sulle persone

“Naturalmente è l'inferno, non il paradiso, che rende potenti i sacerdoti, perché – dopo migliaia di anni di cosiddetta civiltà – la paura rimane l'unico comune denominatore dell'umanità. […] L'essenza di tutta la moralità sacerdotale è la ricompensa, e senza un inferno di qualsivoglia specie, o un altro genere di ricompensa, essa diviene retorica, senza alcun significato.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

Inferno , Sulla paura

“Nulla può venir fuori dall'artista che non sia nell'uomo.”

Henry Louis Mencken

dai Pregiudizi, Quinta serie

“La teologia è il tentativo di spiegare l'inconoscibile nei termini di ciò che non vale la pena conoscere.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

“Il valore d'un sacrificio non è provato dalla causa che vi sta dietro. Migliaia di persone hanno rinunciato alla propria vita con altrettanto coraggio di Gesù, per cause infinitamente meno elevate e luminose. Tutti i martiri, in verità, credono di riuscire a scuotere il mondo, anche se nessun altro vi riuscì come lui.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

Coraggio , Sulla verità , Sulle persone , Sul mondo

“Nessun uomo o donna realmente civile crede oggi nella cosmogonia della Genesi, né nella realtà dell'inferno, e neppure in qualche altra delle antiche imbecillità che ancora godono considerazione presso il grosso popolo. […] In altre parole, l'uomo civile è divenuto il dio di se stesso. Quando incontra delle difficoltà, non ne dà più la colpa all'inimicizia inscrutabile di potenze lontane e ineffabili; le attribuisce alla propria ignoranza ed incompetenza.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

Inferno , Su Dio , Realtà , lontano

“Ci vuol tempo per strappare alla fede e per educare allo scetticismo; tempo, e non poco sforzo e dolore. Soltanto lo scettico della terza generazione è veramente sicuro: suo nonno deve aver accettato il denaro del Diavolo quando era ancora celibe.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Trattato sugli dei

Tempo , Sul denaro , Sforzo , Sul dolore

“Un idealista è uno che, notando che una rosa odora meglio d'un cavolo, ne conclude che se ne possa cavare una minestra migliore.”

Henry Louis Mencken

da A book of burlesques

Divertente

“La coscienza è la voce interiore che ci avverte che qualcuno potrebbe vederci.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Citato in Le Formiche, § 1871

“I grandi artisti non sono mai puritani, e di rado anche rispettabili nel senso normale della parola.”

Henry Louis Mencken

dai Pregiudizi, Prima serie

Senso

“Quando le donne si baciano vengono sempre in mente i lottatori professionisti che si stringono la mano.”

Henry Louis Mencken

Citato in Le Formiche, § 1391

Sulle donne

Henry Louis Mencken: Frasi in inglese

“Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

"The Calamity of Appomattox," The American Mercury (September 1930)
1930s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Prejudices, Fourth Series, ch. 11 (1924)
1920s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Preface to the first edition of The American Credo : A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)
1920s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

201
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

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

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H.L. Mencken

Mencken quotes this in Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941) as a maxim he learned from Al Goodman
Misattributed

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

The Art Eternal, New York Evening Mail (1918)
1910s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist (1910), pg. 116
1910s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

"Duty Before Security", The Smart Set, June 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=ySscAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Women+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%22&pg=RA1-PA49#v=onepage
"The Incomparable Buzzsaw", Prejudices: Second Series, Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=hy47AAAAYAAJ&q=%22Women+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%22&pg=PA237#v=onepage (1920)
1910s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun (4 April 1927)
1920s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 51
1910s

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

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

“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?”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

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

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

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

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H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Origine: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 8

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

"Mussolini" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1931), also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy : New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (1994) edited by Terry Teachout, p. 34
1930s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury (March 1936) - referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1930s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

As quoted in Letters of H. L. Mencken (1961) edited by Guy J. Forgue, p. xiii
1940s–present

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Chicago Tribune (23 May 1926)
1920s

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)
1920s

“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."”

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H.L. Mencken

418
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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.”

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H.L. Mencken

Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun (June 29th, 1925), The Impossible Mencken
1920s

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