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
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
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.
The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.