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
A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and truth in front of patriotic passion.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
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.
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.