H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
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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.
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
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Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances-of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies - the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
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The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
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Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
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In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.