This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.
Think |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
If Wall Street really wants to dispose of John L. Lewis, let it invite him to a swell feed, hand him a fifty-cent cigar with a torpedo in it, and so burn off his eyebrows.
There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one?s vanity?the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.
Day | Fate | God | Hate | Life | Life | Nothing | Fate | God |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change... The progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I read the other day a book defending the Ten Commandments. The best of all arguments for them, however, was omitted. It is that there are not forty of them.
The struggle for a just world in which there is no oppression, servitude, or alienated work will signify the coming of the kingdom ... The complete encounter with the Lord will make an end to history, but it will take place in history.
When all was over at the cemetery Charles returned to the house. There was no one downstairs. He went up into the bedroom and saw her dress hanging up at the foot of the bed. Then, leaning against the secretaire, he remained there till it was dark, lost in sorrowful meditation. After all, she had loved him.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
The building of a just society means overcoming every obstacle to the creation of authentic peace.
Will |
The complete encounter with the Lord will mark an end to history, but it will take place in history.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour?all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.
Men |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.