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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.
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
Thinking
Mental
Life
Thinks
People
Average
Activity
Ends
Really
Never
Mouthing
Men
Clich
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
H. L. Mencken
Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
H. L. Mencken
A poet over 30 is pathetic
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H. L. Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
H. L. Mencken
Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
H. L. Mencken
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
