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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
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Nothing
Simply
Offering
Many
Animal
Occupation
People
Waiting
Curse
State
Hour
Hours
Animals
Death
Worse
States
Soon
Senility
Come
Late
Idle
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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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.
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H. L. Mencken
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.
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What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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