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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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
Comforting
Piece
Poetry
Pieces
Fiction
Less
Music
Lascivious
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
H. L. Mencken
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
H. L. Mencken
I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
H. L. Mencken
Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken
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
Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
H. L. Mencken
Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
H. L. Mencken
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
H. L. Mencken
Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
H. L. Mencken
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken
The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
H. L. Mencken
High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
