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Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.
H. L. Mencken -
Nature abhors a moron.
H. L. Mencken
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
H. L. Mencken -
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
H. L. Mencken -
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
H. L. Mencken -
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken -
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken -
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken
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Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.
H. L. Mencken -
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken -
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.
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.
H. L. Mencken -
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. Mencken -
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken
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It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
H. L. Mencken -
I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor - Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!
H. L. Mencken -
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
H. L. Mencken -
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
H. L. Mencken -
The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
H. L. Mencken -
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken
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Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H. L. Mencken -
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken -
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
H. L. Mencken -
The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.
H. L. Mencken