Quotes by H.L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Anyhow, the hole in the doughnut is at least digestible.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes