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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
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Ten
Difficulty
Keep
Great
Men
Commandments
Gentleman
Keeping
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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