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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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
Work
Every
Something
Absorbing
Autobiography
Charm
Fiction
Becomes
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
H. L. Mencken
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
H. L. Mencken
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
H. L. Mencken
Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
H. L. Mencken
Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
H. L. Mencken
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. Mencken
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
H. L. Mencken
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
H. L. Mencken
I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
H. L. Mencken
It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
H. L. Mencken
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H. L. Mencken
The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
H. L. Mencken
No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
H. L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H. L. Mencken
The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
H. L. Mencken
Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
H. L. Mencken
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
H. L. Mencken
It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
H. L. Mencken
