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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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
Knowledge
Religion
Inspirational
Spirit
Human
Humans
Moonshine
Spirituality
Drinking

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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
H. L. Mencken
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
H. L. Mencken
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
H. L. Mencken
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Every man is his own hell.
H. L. Mencken
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
H. L. Mencken
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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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.
H. L. Mencken