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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Always
Mediocrity
Remarkable
Starts
Several
False
Despite
Chiefly
Literature
Respectable
Much
Promised

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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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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.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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