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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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
First
Scheme
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Philosophy
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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