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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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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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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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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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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.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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