From time to time, especially when public policy news is running sparse, we like to recount the observations of some of history’s greatest free-market economists or of society’s most astute observers. Today, it is one of the latter, Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken.
An irascible curmudgeon (and sometimes referred to as “The Bard of Baltimore”), he was one of the leading sardonic voices on the passing public scene in the waning years of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
His voluminous observations are timeless, as applicable today as they were then. Mencken was the king of reminding that “dyspepticism” – that is, pessimism — in defense of just about anything is a virtue, not a vice.
And, we would add, the fact that it oftentimes makes one laugh in the process is a bonus.
To wit:
“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.”
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
“The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda — a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”
“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally, he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”
“Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.”
“You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”
Thanks to the still quite contemporary words of H.L. Mencken, that width is wider and that depth is deeper than ever.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
