Quote

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
Make
Laughter
Cockroach
Life
Laugh
Pebble
Laughing
Cockroaches
Takes
Spaghetti
Suffering
Pebbles
Woman
Shoe
Littles
Unbearable
Little
Shoes

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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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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.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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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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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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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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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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