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
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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.
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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.
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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.
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.