I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled...They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.
H. L. MenckenThe American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
H. L. MenckenPedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
H. L. MenckenThose who can't teach - administrate. Those who can't administrate - go into politics.
H. L. MenckenSome time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
H. L. MenckenThe truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. ... A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously.
H. L. Mencken