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
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.
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.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
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.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
Never underestimate the booberie of the booboisie.
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.