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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

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
Enemy
Sympathy
Woman
Enemies
Two
Gain
Women
Gains
Make
Married
Men
Friend
Wife
Either
Sympathize

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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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