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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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
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Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Complain
Complaining
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Husband
Sympathetically
Marriage
Husbands
Listening
Wives
Wife
Boast
Women
Popularity
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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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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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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