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
Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.
I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.
An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.
The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.