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
As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain,
It is more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.