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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
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Journalist
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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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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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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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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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
H. L. Mencken