This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Don't waste time learning the "tricks of the trade." Instead, learn the trade.
Daughter |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty and the democratic form is as bad as any of the other forms.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
Sorrow |
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 |
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.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
Daughter |
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
I think the atmosphere of a Prom concert can change your life, in the best way. It's so deep, the feeling you have there. The audience is so close, and there are so many of them, that you feel they are almost embracing you.
Good |
We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a na‹ve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
World |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust?
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understand these [metaphysical] fallacies as logical non sequiturs?as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as ?meaningless? are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, In our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.
I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.
Bride |