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
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians -- and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money.
The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.