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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
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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
Men
Frame
Superiority
Jealous
Plainly
Superior
Aristotle
Superiors
Beethoven
Image
Bodily
Average
Perish
Made
Eager
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
H. L. Mencken
...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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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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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
H. L. Mencken
When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
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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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
H. L. Mencken
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
