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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

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
Golf
Sports
Impossible
Imagine
Literature
Billiards
Good
Goethe
Beethoven
Gambling

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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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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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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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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.
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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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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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