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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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
Certainties
Demands
Certainty
Demand
Decision
Public
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
H. L. Mencken
Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
H. L. Mencken
There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
H. L. Mencken
The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
H. L. Mencken
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
H. L. Mencken
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
H. L. Mencken
One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
H. L. Mencken
A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
H. L. Mencken
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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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
H. L. Mencken
The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
H. L. Mencken
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
