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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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
Long
Praising
Complain
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Complaining
Alcohol
Praise
Shall
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
H. L. Mencken
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
H. L. Mencken
The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
H. L. Mencken
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
H. L. Mencken
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
H. L. Mencken
There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
H. L. Mencken
The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
H. L. Mencken
Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
H. L. Mencken
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
H. L. Mencken
The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
H. L. Mencken
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
H. L. Mencken
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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