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H. L. Mencken Quotes about Art

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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Running, Art, Majority Rule

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.622, Vintage

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.

Art, Latin, Believe

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.

Art, Government, Effort

H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.207, Knopf

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.

Art, Men, Agony

H.L. Mencken (2012). “American Language Supplement 2”, p.563, Knopf

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops

Art, Believe, Knowledge

H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.363, Knopf

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

Art, Ymca, World

Prejudices, First Series ch. 16 (1919)

Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.

Art, Politics, Entertainment

What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.

Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.617, Vintage

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

Art, Blue, Proof

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Art, Errors, Literature

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.434, Vintage

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

Art, Determination, Writing

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Art, Animal, Men

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.617, Vintage

[Art is] an attempt to escape from life.

Art, Art Is

It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.

Country, Art, Society

H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.562, Vintage

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

Running, Art, Writing

H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.27, Knopf

The truth is . . . that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

Art, Book, Reading

H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

Art, Men, Broken

H.L. Mencken (1920). “Prejudices Second Series”

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