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 more a man dreams, the less he believes.
Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."
It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won't. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
How do they taste? They taste like more.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.
Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.