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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
H. L. Mencken
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
H. L. Mencken
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
H. L. Mencken
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Nature abhors a moron.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken