Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, editor, literary critic, and historian of language. He became celebrated as an iconoclastic critic of American society and frequently condemned its Puritanism and hypocrisy.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Mencken became editor of the Baltimore Herald, and then joined the Sunpapers in 1906. From 1908–23, he worked with the Smart Set, and in 1924 he and the Drama Critic George Jean Nathan founded the American Mercury, which Mencken edited until 1933.
Mencken became a significant influence on the American literary scene of the 1920s and supported many writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. Mencken’s primary work is The American Language (1919, revised 1921, 1923, 1936; supplementary volumes, 1945, 1948,) wherein he opposed the dominance of European culture in America. This momentous attempt to organize the vigor and versatility of colloquial American usage made Mencken the leading authority on the language of his country.
Mencken’s reviews of American social and cultural norms and miscellaneous essays filled six volumes appropriately titled Prejudices (1919–27.) His autobiographical trilogy, Happy Days (1940,) Newspaper Days (1941,) and Heathen Days (1943,) is devoted to his experiences in journalism.
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Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Family
Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Education, Universities
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Work, Stress
There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Idleness
Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Occupation
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Money
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.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Thinking
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Confidence
Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.
—H. L. Mencken
It is only doubt that creates. It is the minority that counts.
—H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Love
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
—H. L. Mencken
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Class
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Religion
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Belief, Faith
Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume.
—H. L. Mencken
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Men, Women, Nature, Men & Women
A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Literature
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