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 human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.
He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
Every man is his own hell.
No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.