Quote

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

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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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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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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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