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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
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Conditionally
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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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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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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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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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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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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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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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 way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
H. L. Mencken
