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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

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
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
State
Funny
Anesthesia
Woman
Perceptual
Young
Goddess
States
Merely
Love
Ordinary
Mistake

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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.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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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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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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