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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
H. L. Mencken
The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
H. L. Mencken
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
H. L. Mencken
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
H. L. Mencken
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
H. L. Mencken
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
H. L. Mencken
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
H. L. Mencken
My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
H. L. Mencken
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
H. L. Mencken
A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
H. L. Mencken
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken
If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
H. L. Mencken
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
H. L. Mencken
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. Mencken
