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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
Mistake
State
Funny
Woman
Anesthesia
Young
Perceptual
States
Goddess
Love
Merely
Ordinary

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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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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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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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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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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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