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
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.