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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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
Burglars
Ethical
Politician
Honest
Looking
Political
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Burglar
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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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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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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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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Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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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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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
H. L. Mencken
Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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