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
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
How do they taste? They taste like more.
The more a man dreams, the less he believes.
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.