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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
People
Waiting
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Hour
Hours
Animals
Death
Worse
States
Soon
Senility
Come
Late
Idle
Nothing
Simply
Offering
Many
Animal
Occupation
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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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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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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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.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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