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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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Historian
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Almost
Metaphysics
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Incredible
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Unintelligible
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.
H. L. Mencken
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
H. L. Mencken
Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
No man ever quite believes in any other man.
H. L. Mencken
It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
H. L. Mencken
The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
H. L. Mencken
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
H. L. Mencken
Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
H. L. Mencken
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
H. L. Mencken
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
H. L. Mencken
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken
The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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