This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
People | Popularity |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I, but the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air?that progress made under the shadow of the policeman?s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave? In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen? I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.
Creativity | Energy | Enthusiasm | Freedom | Good | People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
Controversy | Love | People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
People |
When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds ? like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.
People |
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
I love to travel, but sometimes it's nice to stay in one place.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
People |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I do not pretend, of course, that I have never done it; mere politeness forces one to it; there are women who sulk and grow bellicose unless one at least makes the motions of kissing them. But what I mean is that I have never found the act a tenth part as agreeable as poets, the authors of musical comedy librettos, and (on the contrary side) chaperones and the gendarmerie make it out. The physical sensation, far from being pleasant, is intensely uncomfortable?the suspension of respiration, indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation?and the posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a man kisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those windows of the soul, synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of the incompressibility of the nasal cartilages, he has to incline either his or her head to an angle of at least 60 degrees, and the result is that his right eye gazes insanely at the space between her eyebrows, while his left eye is fixed upon some vague spot behind her. An instantaneous photograph of such a maneuvre, taken at the moment of incidence, would probably turn the stomach of even the most romantic man, and force him, in sheer self-respect, to renounce kissing as he has renounced leap-frog and walking on stilts.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
Monumentality is an affair of relativity. The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else ? its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.
People |
Poor men do penance for rich men's sins.
Experience | Openness | People | Personality | Safe |
Public money is like holy water, every one helps himself to it.
Nothing improves the taste of pasta more than a good appetite.
Take the will for the deed.
Focus | Government | People | Price | Government |