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
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.