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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Signs
Jealousy
Wrong
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Observer
Keen
Observers
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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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.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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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.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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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.
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