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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
American
World
Philadelphia
Leads
Thus
Cities
Probably
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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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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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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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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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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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 first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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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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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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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 mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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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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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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