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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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
Literature
Age
Lying
History
Legend
Attained
Legends
Birthday
Dignity
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
H. L. Mencken
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
H. L. Mencken
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
H. L. Mencken
It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
H. L. Mencken
Every man is his own hell.
H. L. Mencken
Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
H. L. Mencken
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
H. L. Mencken
Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
