H. L. Mencken Quotes About Tragedy

• Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Laughing, Tragedy

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.21, Knopf

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Spiritual, War

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.131, Vintage

• Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.

  H. L. Mencken

  Character, Men, Contemporary Fiction

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

• Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Iron

  "More Tips for Novelists". "Chicago Tribune" Newspaper, May 2, 1926.

• It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

  H. L. Mencken

  Real, Tragedy, Adults

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.308, Vintage

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