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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
Women
Popularity
Men
Complain
Complaining
Capacity
Husband
Sympathetically
Marriage
Husbands
Listening
Wives
Wife
Boast
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
H. L. Mencken
Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
H. L. Mencken
The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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