Word: mencken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...beloved King James, Macdonald wrote, "is like walking through an old city that has just been given, if not a saturation bombing, a thorough going-over." As a satirical gadfly, cultural critic and detector of cant, Macdonald was a worthy successor to the sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken...
...land of ignorance, the mendacious will flourish. Democracy's natural selection has left the realm of American politics a suitable habitat only for prevaricators, causists, and scoundrels. Now more than ever democracy is, as H.L. Mencken put it, "the art of running the zoo from the monkey cage...
...Harvard is Harvard--the place founded by Puritans and haunted, as H.L. Mencken said, "by the fear that somewhere, someone might be happy...
...when H.L. Mencken collaborated with a statistician on three articles trying to establish the worst state in America, Mississippi won that upside-down contest, but with Arkansas and Alabama hotly contesting the bad eminence. Arkansas, near the bottom in most categories, was at the bottom for insolvency. V.O. Key Jr., in his famous study Southern Politics in State and Nation, gave the prize for fraudulent elections to Tennessee -- but Arkansas was a close second. Diane Blair, a political scientist who has written the best study of the state's constitutional structure, calls Arkansas nearly ungovernable. Yet Clinton has governed...
...Vile Body is largely the creation of Teachout, a Missouri-born polymath who plays jazz piano, reviews records and ballet, and is gearing up to write a biography of H.L. Mencken. When he moved to New York from the Midwest three years ago, Teachout was dismayed to discover that the city was, as he puts it, "hostile to civilized friendship." There was little opportunity for people of his age and ideology to coalesce for intellectual sustenance. "Conservatives and libertarians exist in an adversary culture," he explains. "You need a community where you don't have to be arguing first causes...