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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.

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
Always
Coattails
Men
Hanging
Nose
Noses
Leading
Woman
Natural
Another

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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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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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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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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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