H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken

… essayist and editor, was born on September 12th in 1880. I’ve posted many of these before, but Mencken has some great lines that I never tire of reading:

  • Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
  • A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
  • It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
  • The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
  • It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
  • Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
  • No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
  • Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
  • I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

One thought on “H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken”

  1. H.L. was one of the literary lights along with Ambrose Bierce and Pogo. (No, I didn’t forget Will Shakespeare – he was of a different bent.)

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