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
Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.
Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.
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.
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.
[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.