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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

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
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Main
Ought
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
H. L. Mencken
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
H. L. Mencken
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
H. L. Mencken
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
H. L. Mencken
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
H. L. Mencken
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
H. L. Mencken
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
H. L. Mencken
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
H. L. Mencken
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
H. L. Mencken
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[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
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. Mencken
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It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
H. L. Mencken
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
H. L. Mencken
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H. L. Mencken
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
H. L. Mencken
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
H. L. Mencken