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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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
Miniature
Miniatures
Enormously
Exaggerated
Theatre
Done
Life
Hideously
Magnified
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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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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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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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.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit natureā¦ the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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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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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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