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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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
Palpably
Follies
Untrue
Folly
Common
Believe
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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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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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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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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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
H. L. Mencken
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
H. L. Mencken
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
H. L. Mencken
Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
H. L. Mencken
