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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.

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
Drink
Work
Never

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
H. L. Mencken
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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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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
H. L. Mencken
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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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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
H. L. Mencken
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
H. L. Mencken
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
H. L. Mencken
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
H. L. Mencken
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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
H. L. Mencken
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
H. L. Mencken
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
H. L. Mencken
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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
H. L. Mencken
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
H. L. Mencken
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
H. L. Mencken