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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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
Coolidge
Nero
Slept
Politics
Whether
President
Night
Political
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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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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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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[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.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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