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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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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
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
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
H. L. Mencken
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
H. L. Mencken
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
H. L. Mencken
Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
H. L. Mencken
Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
H. L. Mencken
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken
No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
H. L. Mencken
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
H. L. Mencken
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
H. L. Mencken
He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
H. L. Mencken
It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
H. L. Mencken
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
H. L. Mencken
Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
H. L. Mencken
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken