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
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
Goverment is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are the most tolerable are arbitary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far - much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.
The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.
New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, and the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; he will set them above their betters.
The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.