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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Women
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Even
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Woman
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
H. L. Mencken
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
H. L. Mencken
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
H. L. Mencken
I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
H. L. Mencken
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
H. L. Mencken
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
H. L. Mencken
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
H. L. Mencken
Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
H. L. Mencken
Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
H. L. Mencken
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
H. L. Mencken
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
H. L. Mencken
The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
H. L. Mencken
