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 Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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 only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.