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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

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
Work
Movable
Irresistible
Temptation
Force
Body

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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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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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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
H. L. Mencken