Reality... ,infinite love only truth: Question?

[space lizard]

Hi, I'm in work and the books at home.

Last night I was reading reality is an illusion, infinite love is the only truth.

There was a quote from an interesting social critic who said something along the lines of:

"the main job of the american president is to seem to reflect the aspirations of the public in his demeanor / personality. One day the american public will get their wish, and a moron will be elected to run the white house."

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Can anyone who has the book tell me the guys name?

Thanks

[abrilliantone]

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people..."On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

[space lizard]

thanks!

[snoopsnuffleopagus]

Cordial Felicitations!:

abrilliantone: even before reading your post, that is exactly what I was thinking. It was a true joy to see that posted!

Kind Regards: Snoopsnuffleopagus

[abrilliantone]

:) Thanks Snoopsnuffleopagus

[space lizard]

More Quotes from Mencken:

A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Nature abhors a moron.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
Platitude — An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.
Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.
We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
Historian — An unsuccessful novelist.
Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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.
Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.
Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.
Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.
Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't they'd be married, too.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.
Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
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?

[space lizard]

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.
Preface to the First Edition, The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)
There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.
"The Divine Afflatus", New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917); later published in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
Prejudices, Second Series, ch. 1 (1920)
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Baltimore Sun (July 26, 1920)
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
Coda, from Smart Set (December 1920)
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
Epitaph, from Smart Set (December 1921)
To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am—a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions—can be so happy as he can be in the United States.
On Being An American (1922)
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
Baltimore Evening Sun (February 12, 1923)
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.
Prejudices, Fourth Series, ch. 11 (1924)
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)
For 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.
Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)
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.
Baltimore Evening Sun (August 9, 1926)
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind—that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overborne by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
Forum (September 1930)
When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
Newspaper Days: 1899-1906 (1941)
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
[edit]A Book of Prefaces (1917)
The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
Ch. 1
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
Ch. 2
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
Ch. 4
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
Ch. 4
[edit]Prejudices, First Series (1919)
The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
Ch. 3
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
Ch. 13
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
Ch. 16
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Ch. 16
[edit]Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
Ch. 3
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.
Ch. 3
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
Ch. 3
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Ch. 3
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Ch. 14

[space lizard]

Truth and justice
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.

[space lizard]

Democracy, government, America, and newspapers
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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 argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
Democracy is the pathetic belief in the wisdom of collective ignorance.

[space lizard]

Preachers, politicians, lawyers, and teachers
Liberals have many tails and chase them all.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking--actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.
When the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.

[space lizard]

Human condition
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
Those who can—do. Those who can't—teach.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
'Tis more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.
Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

[space lizard]

Morality, conscience, and truth
Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth -- that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

[space lizard]

Religion, theology, and God
One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the thirteenth century.

[druggalo]

word

[killuminati18]

Yeah its a pretty afirmation and im not saying it isnt true but real life is much more complicated than that man. In real life you have to kick your balls 5 days a week to be somebody in this fucking tricky life...the street is the reality, if you want to have something to eat, something to wear and a house theres two things to do: work or study.


Yes I know maybe people can say: so what does this have to do with the first afirmation?? well the point is that life is more complicated than that...first we have to change this fucking system were going on, speak about close truths and then we can talk about more complicated filosophy things. When i talk to people about this things i talk them about 911 truth, Club Bilderberg...etc because thats the primary targets...once understood this than we can talk about more things. Its just my opinion.