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H L Mencken Inspirational Quotes (501)

Page 7 of 21
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
H. L. Mencken
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
H. L. Mencken
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
H. L. Mencken
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
H. L. Mencken
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
H. L. Mencken
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
H. L. Mencken
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
H. L. Mencken
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
H. L. Mencken
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
H. L. Mencken
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
H. L. Mencken
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. Mencken
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
H. L. Mencken
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
H. L. Mencken
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
H. L. Mencken
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
H. L. Mencken
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
H. L. Mencken
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
H. L. Mencken
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
H. L. Mencken
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
H. L. Mencken
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. Mencken
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
H. L. Mencken
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