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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Something
Valuable
Morality
Civilization
Liberty
Wisdom
Religion
Character
Even
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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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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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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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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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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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
H. L. Mencken
In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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