H. L. Mencken Quotes About Fighting

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Time, Freedom, Fighting

  "Shut Down Chick-fil-A Properly" by James Peron, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 25, 2012.

• All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.

  H. L. Mencken

  Peace, War, Fighting

• The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

  H. L. Mencken

  Love, Courage, Lying

  Notes on Democracy pt. 3 (1926)

• [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fighting, Government, People

• In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sex, Fighting, Men

• Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fighting, Voting, Stronger

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.312, Knopf

• Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

  H. L. Mencken

  Strong, Fighting, Fate

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.160, Vintage

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