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.
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.
Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians -- and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions can be so happy as he can be in the United States.