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"

  • Der Tag 2024

    September 14, 2024 (Saturday) Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathederal St 10:30 AM Annual Meeting of The Mencken Society. Speakers: Fred Hobson by way of remote conferencing and a discussion between John Barr, professor of history at Lone Star College, and Darryl Hart. 2:00 PM The 2024 Mencken Memorial Lecture will be presented by Thomas…

  • Oktoberfest With A Menckenian Flavor

    Problem: Your appetite for bratwurst and sauerbraten is getting sated but you still want to celebrate Oktoberfest. Solution: Enjoy a day of Mencken at the American Goethe Society of Washington, D.C. with an entertaining lecture (in English) by the renown Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and a showing of the film Inherit the Wind (1960).…

  • Mr Mencken Recommends … Dragon’s Blood

    There is a nice illustrated version of Henry Milner Rideout’s Dragon’s Blood (Houghton-Mifflin, 1909) available from Project Gutenberg. From Smart Set 28(3):153-160 (1909-07) [546 words]: [Dragon’s Blood is] a novel of great merit and greater promise. A hundred journeyman fictioneers might have imagined the story it tells, but a distressingly small number, even among the…

  • Mencken Day 2013

    Mencken Day 2013 will be held on September 7, 2013 at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St, Baltimore, MD. Schedule 10:30 a.m. — Mencken Society annual meeting 1:30 p.m. — The 2013 Mencken Memorial Lecture — “An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine” by Dr. Howard Markel.…

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  • Mr Mencken Tweets

    HLMenckenBot

  • Mr Mencken on CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley

    Mr Mencken was used to introduce the final segment of the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley for 2013-08-05. The story was about Carol Ott of Baltimore who shames owners of run-down property in the city by posting their names and photographs of their falling-down buildings on her website http://slumlordwatch.wordpress.com/. The introductory part of the…

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