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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H. L. Mencken
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
H. L. Mencken
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken
When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
H. L. Mencken
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
H. L. Mencken
[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
H. L. Mencken
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
H. L. Mencken
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken
The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
H. L. Mencken
The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
H. L. Mencken
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
H. L. Mencken
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
H. L. Mencken
The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
H. L. Mencken
Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
H. L. Mencken
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
H. L. Mencken
