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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Denounce
Pronounce
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Judgment
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Moral
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Moralizing
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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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.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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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 think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
H. L. Mencken
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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