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"

  • Mr Mencken’s “Hatrack”, Part 1

    Eighty-seven years ago subscribers to the American Mercury were receiving the April number of the magazine little knowing that 2,943 words occupying not quite four-and-a-half pages would create an anti-censorship tempest-in-a-teapot. The banning in Boston of the article titled “Hatrack” made the front page of the Sun but was sent to pages in the mid-twenties…

  • Tour the Mencken House With Marion Rodgers

    Johns Hopkins’ Odyssey Program offers two tours of the Mencken House on Saturday, April 20, 2013, conducted by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. The course fee is $30 for either the morning or the afternoon tour. There is a $3 entrance donation to benefit the Friends of the H. L. Mencken House at the door. Section 01…

  • How to Drink Like a Gentleman

    Mr Mencken observed that “[d]rinking with skill and taste is no more a natural art than love; either it must be learned by the onerous proc­ess of trial and error, or it must be taught. Plainly enough, the latter way is the better” and offered a short tutorial which appeared in Liberty magazine of January…

  • The 2013 Mencken Graveside Memorial Service

    The eighth Mencken Graveside Memorial Service will again be conducted by Oleg Panczenko. When: Sunday, January 27, 2013 at 2:00 PM Where: Mencken Family Gravesite, Loudon Park Cemetery, 3620 Wilkens Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21229 Mr Mencken’s grave is in Lot W 224 North Half, Space 4, N 39° 16.693′ W 76° 40.683′ (39.278217°, -76.678050°). Google…

  • Arthur J. Gutman, 1911-2012

    Arthur J. Gutman, president of the Mencken Society from 1979 to 1999 and former Vice President of Warfield-Dorsey Insurance passed away Monday evening, November 26, 2012. He was interred at the Oheb Shalom Congregation Cemetery, 6130 O’Donnell Street, Baltimore, on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 2 PM.

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