H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
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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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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
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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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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
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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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A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
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The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
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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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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.