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
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong...