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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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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.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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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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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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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.
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Some 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.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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