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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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
Torture
Duty
Achieve
Sense
Also
Men
Tortures
Prodigies
Enables
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
H. L. Mencken
Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
H. L. Mencken
A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
H. L. Mencken
What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
H. L. Mencken
Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
H. L. Mencken
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
H. L. Mencken
The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
H. L. Mencken
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
H. L. Mencken
Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
H. L. Mencken
