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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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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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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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