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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.

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
Read
Much
People

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H. L. Mencken
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
H. L. Mencken
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
H. L. Mencken
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
H. L. Mencken
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
H. L. Mencken
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Every man is his own hell.
H. L. Mencken
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
H. L. Mencken
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
H. L. Mencken
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
H. L. Mencken
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
H. L. Mencken
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
H. L. Mencken
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
H. L. Mencken
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
H. L. Mencken
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
H. L. Mencken