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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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
Giving
Tension
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Literature
Relieved
Enjoy
Attain
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Cows
Feelings
Milk
Order
Achieved
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
H. L. Mencken
It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
H. L. Mencken
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
H. L. Mencken
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
H. L. Mencken
The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
H. L. Mencken
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H. L. Mencken
Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
H. L. Mencken
If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
H. L. Mencken
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. Mencken
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H. L. Mencken
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
H. L. Mencken
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
H. L. Mencken
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken
Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
H. L. Mencken
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H. L. Mencken
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken
Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
H. L. Mencken
