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It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken -
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
H. L. Mencken
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A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.
H. L. Mencken -
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
H. L. Mencken -
Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.
H. L. Mencken -
It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
H. L. Mencken -
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken -
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
H. L. Mencken
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken -
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
H. L. Mencken -
There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken -
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. Mencken -
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.
H. L. Mencken -
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
H. L. Mencken -
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
H. L. Mencken -
When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken -
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
H. L. Mencken -
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken -
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth
H. L. Mencken -
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
H. L. Mencken