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
Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.
Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.
God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
Christian--One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.
Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.
The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.
Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
Chopin--Two embalmers at work upon a minor poetthe scent of tuberosesAutumn rain.
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.