H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Menckenwas a German-American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. As a scholar Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. His satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 September 1880
CountryUnited States of America
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
Life is a dead-end street.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.