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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
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Complain
Complaining
Capacity
Husband
Sympathetically
Marriage
Husbands
Listening
Wives
Wife
Boast
Women
Popularity
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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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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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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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.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
H. L. Mencken
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H. L. Mencken
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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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
H. L. Mencken
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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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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