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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Historian
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Numbers
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Definition
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
H. L. Mencken
The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
H. L. Mencken
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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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
Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
H. L. Mencken
One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
H. L. Mencken
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken
A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
H. L. Mencken
When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
