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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
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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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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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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Why do men go to zoos?
H. L. Mencken
