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A poet over 30 is pathetic

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
Pathetic
Poet

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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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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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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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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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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
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
H. L. Mencken
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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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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
H. L. Mencken