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
I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.
War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.