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
The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety
Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation
The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man
There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often.... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.