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What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.
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
Often
Truth
Ails
Human
Caressing
Humans
Amusing
Mind
Mainly
Something
Seeks
Dull
Uncomfortable
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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