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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
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Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Decent
Integrity
Liberty
Politics
Freedom
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Lives
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Every
Ashamed
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
H. L. Mencken
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
H. L. Mencken
I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
H. L. Mencken
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
H. L. Mencken
Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
H. L. Mencken
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
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
H. L. Mencken
