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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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
Woman
Shoe
Littles
Unbearable
Little
Shoes
Make
Laughter
Cockroach
Life
Laugh
Pebble
Laughing
Cockroaches
Takes
Spaghetti
Suffering
Pebbles
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
H. L. Mencken
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H. L. Mencken
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken
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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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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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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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
H. L. Mencken
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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