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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.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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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.
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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.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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