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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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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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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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