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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

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
Men
Tears
Sympathetic
World
Whose
Double
Wife
Laughed
Woman
Standard
Away
Survive
Women
Morality
Made
Standards
Lured
Long
Husband
Favoured

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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.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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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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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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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.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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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.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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