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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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
Culinary
Sober
Cooking
Teetotalers
Murder
Abel
Food
Perpetrated
History
Villainy
Great
Onward
Men
Chiefly
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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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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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
H. L. Mencken
The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
H. L. Mencken
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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