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
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.