H.L. Mencken quotes Showing 1-30 of 323 “I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.” “The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.” “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.
It was precisely this antagonism to American heterodoxy that allowed Mencken to flourish as an early 20th-century cultural commentator. As you'll see in the quotes above, many today rightly regard H.L. Mencken as one of the most astute cultural critics in American history.
“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life,” Mencken declared. “When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.”
Influential pundits of the past like Walter Lippmann are long forgotten, but people still read Mencken’s work. During the past decade, publishers have issued almost a dozen books about him or by him. Biographer William Nolte reports that Mencken ranks among the most frequently quoted American authors. Certainly Mencken was among the wittiest.
Publisher Alfred Knopf had this to say about Mencken, a close friend for more than 40 years: “His public side was visible to everyone: tough, cynical, amusing, and exasperating by turns. The private man was something else again: sentimental, generous, and unwavering—sometimes almost blind—in his devotion to people of whom he felt fond . . . the most charming manners conceivable, manners I was to discover he always displayed in talking with women . . . he spent a fantastic amount of his time getting friends to and from doctors’ waiting rooms and hospitals, comforting them and keeping them company there.”
For a brief period, Mencken faced his ideological battles with a romantic partner. In May 1923, he delivered a talk called “how to catch a husband” at Baltimore’s Goucher College and there met a 26-year-old, Alabama-born English teacher named Sara Haardt. He was taken by her good looks, radiant intelligence and passion for literature. She saw a decent, joyous, civilized man. A lifelong bachelor who had lived with his mother until she died in 1925, when he was 45, Mencken was wary of marriage. Apparently Sara’s worsening tuberculosis brought him to the altar. After her death on May 31, 1935, Mencken wrote a friend: “When I married Sara, the doctors said she could not live more than three years. Actually, she lived five, so I had two more years of happiness than I had any right to expect.”
It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flophouses and disturbing the peace.”. Mencken stood about five feet, eight inches tall and weighed around 175 pounds. He parted his slick brown hair in the middle.
Mencken played the piano with great enthusiasm. Other participants played the violin, cello, flute, oboe, drums, French horn, and piano. They most often played for a couple hours in a violin-maker’s shop and afterwards went to the Hotel Rennert for beer.
The first story he ever sold, to the Baltimore Herald, was about a stolen horse. By June that year, he was a full-time reporter earning $7 a week.
Mencken denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt for amassing dangerous political power and for maneuvering to enter World War II, and he again lost his newspaper job.
In 1920, with World War I a bad memory, the Baltimore Sun asked Mencken to resume writing a column for $50 a week. Thus began his memorable “Monday” articles which appeared weekly for the next 18 years.
A student of Friedrich Nietzsche and Mark Twain, Mencken was a detractor of representative democracy, religion, and social norms, and thus stood in stark contrast against the political and philosophical foundations of the United States.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. Wikimedia Commons
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. Bettmann / Getty Images
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. George Karger / Getty Images
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Corbis Historical
As you'll see in the quotes above, many today rightly regard H.L. Mencken as one of the most astute cultural critics in American history. And he certainly didn't hold back.