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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Tortures
Prodigies
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Torture
Duty
Achieve
Sense
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
H. L. Mencken
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
H. L. Mencken
The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
H. L. Mencken
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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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
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
H. L. Mencken
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
H. L. Mencken
