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 chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.