… 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.
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.)