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Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Immemorial
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Imbecility
Men
Deliberately
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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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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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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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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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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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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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
H. L. Mencken
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken
Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken