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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Metropolis
Nineteen
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Angeles
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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