Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
—Thomas Carlyle
"To have been always in the right and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism,—and yet never to lose anything, not even position or public esteem, is pleasant enough. A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a man can have. There is a large body of such men in England, and, personally, they are the very salt of the nation. He who said that all Conservatives are stupid did not know them. Stupid Conservatives there may be,—and there certainly are very stupid Radicals. The well-educated, widely-read Conservative, who is well assured that all good things are gradually being brought to an end by the voice of the people, is generally the pleasantest man to be met."
- Anthony Trollope (in The Eustace Diamonds)
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H. L. Mencken
The more I see of men, the better I like dogs.
- Madame Roland
vox populi, vox humbug
- W. T. Sherman
Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once There was The People - it shall never be again!
- Rudyard Kipling (quoted from Easy as A.B.C.)
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
- John Adams
[T]he first Whig was the devil
- Samuel Johnson
The people that awakes, first shouts, then gets drunk, pillages, [and] murders, and later goes back to sleep.
- Don Colacho
Hi. Big fan of the site. Just wondering if you’ll be attending the HL Mencken Club conference this year.
http://www.hlmenckenclub.org/HL_Mencken_Club/Home.html
It’s run by Richard Spencer of AltRight, it’s a good forum for heterodox thinkers!
Rob,
Thanks! I will definitely try to attend.
Do you have an email address? I’d rather send my nitpicky spelling corrections and the like that way than in the comments.
fosetiwp@gmail.com
Fun reading: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/lwc13/have_you_ever_been_called_out_for_being_a_racist/