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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

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
Giving
Necessary
Soar
Men
Dreams
Wholly
Secret
Cynical
Woman
Objective
Dream
Wit
Womanly
Form
Creature
Soaring
Give
Objectives
Lacks
Women
Creatures
Manly

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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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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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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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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.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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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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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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