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
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.