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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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
Conceited
Realities
Deny
Obvious
Effort
Religion
Reality
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
H. L. Mencken
There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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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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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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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
Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
