The Mencken Society

Promoting the living works of Henry Louis Mencken, the "Sage of Baltimore"

  • A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
  • Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
  • Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
  • Every man is his own hell.
  • Historian – An unsuccessful novelist.
  • Misogynist – A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
  • Optimist – The sort of man who marries his sister’s best friend.
  • Puritanism – The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. 
  • The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
  • The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.
  • The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity.  It ended, again like the Salvation Army began, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
  • Wealth – Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Promoting the living works of Henry Louis Mencken, the "Sage of Baltimore"

  • Last Week with H. L. Mencken (Feb. 3, 2023 edition)

    January 29 – “Inherit the Wind” is returning to the stage in Albuquerque: “This enthralling drama is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, which resulted in John T. Scopes’ being convicted for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to a high school science class, contrary to a Tennessee law. The character of […]

  • Last Week with H. L. Mencken (Jan. 27, 2023 edition)

    January 22 — Anthony J. DeBlasi on the intelligence of the American public: “H. L. Mencken had something to say about terminal dumbing, back in 1920, that makes me wonder if he was joking: ‘As democracy is perfected,’ he said, ‘the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. […]

  • Last Week with H. L. Mencken (Jan. 23, 2023 edition)

    See how writers were quoting Mencken last week and which quotations they used. January 16 — From Herb Caen at the Anderson Valley Advertiser: “What I consider the most cynical utterance in the entire literature of Americana — H.L. Mencken’s ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public’ — presents a […]

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  • Last Week with H. L. Mencken

    See how writers were quoting Mencken last week and which quotations they used. January 8 – from a book review about war in Afghanistan: “I think you could put 100 war memoirs on a shelf and they would not contain as many references to Western intellectuals as Rubin’s 290-page book, which mentions Herbert Marcuse, Susan […]

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  • Mencken Day Panel Video (6 of 6) (September 9, 2022)

    This panel co-sponsored by The Mencken Society (TMS) and the Mencken House (MH) took place the day before Mencken Day 2022 (Sept. 10). The discussion explores the dimensions of Mencken’s views, their conventional labeling as conservative, and how they might relate to contemporary political stances. The panel included Darryl Hart, president of TMS and author […]

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© The Mencken Society 2022