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
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
The worst government is the most moral.
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.
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