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H L Mencken Inspirational Quotes (501)

Page 10 of 21
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
H. L. Mencken
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
H. L. Mencken
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
H. L. Mencken
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
H. L. Mencken
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
H. L. Mencken
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
H. L. Mencken
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
H. L. Mencken
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
H. L. Mencken
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
H. L. Mencken
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
H. L. Mencken
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
H. L. Mencken
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
H. L. Mencken
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
H. L. Mencken
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
H. L. Mencken
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
H. L. Mencken
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
H. L. Mencken
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
H. L. Mencken
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
H. L. Mencken
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