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…

  • Mr Mencken on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

    Mr Mencken on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as performed by Dr John C. “Chuck” Chalberg, professor of history at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. For more on Mr Mencken’s opinion of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, see “Mark Twain: Popularity Index” and “Our One Authentic Giant” in William H. Nolte, H. L. Mencken’s Smart…

  • Oliver Platt reads Mr Mencken’s “The Politician” (1940)

    Oliver Platt reads Mr Mencken’s “The Politician”. The piece can be found in the Chrestomathy and is an adaptation of Mr Mencken’s lecture before the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, January 4, 1940.

  • Mencken on Drinking Alcohol

    In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Donald Kirkley on June 30, 1948, the ombibulous Mr Mencken comments on alcoholic beverages and offers timeless advice on how to enjoy alcohol.

  • Marion Rodgers on Mencken and the Red Scare

    Marion Elizabeth Rodgers will speak on Mencken’s writings concerning “The Red Scare.” “In the deportation of radicals after the Red Scare, of April 1921, Mencken reminded his readers that “probably two-thirds of those allegedly Reds were wholly innocent, and even the guilty ones were not fairly tried.” Though by no means sharing the views of…

  • 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…

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