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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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
Eight
Intelligence
Large
Murky
Room
Spot
Rooms
Floor
Small
Spots
Light
Suppose
Nine
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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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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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.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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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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Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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