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
High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.
What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
Anyhow, the hole in the donut is at least digestible.
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.
The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English.
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.
The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.