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
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.