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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Commandments
Gentleman
Keeping
Ten
Difficulty
Keep
Great
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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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.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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