H. L. Mencken Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do. Never for an instant harbor a doubt of it.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents.
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As much preparation as I had made for the old man Salieri, gestures and so on, the fact is after sitting for hours, your movements are kind of slow.
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A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.
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I don't believe in regret.
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I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea, so who am I to argue, even if I've never experienced it?
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When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
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The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.
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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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Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.
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I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.
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There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.
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Don't jump on a man unless he is down.
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Yes, I believe the will is very important. It's how I have succeeded in life.
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Turns out you have a really fun time if you go to work every day and focus on being silly and funny and happy!
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I believe a true Hindu in India could never have endorsed the killing of the Mahatma.
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
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I've put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.
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For me, an aerial picture is no different than a close-up portrait. It's a question of framing and angle. Helicopters are great for that. But I've also used planes. Of course, I always have a harness.
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Any time you're nominated for anything, it's a true blessing and something you should be really excited about, but it's sort of time to not be considered new anymore because I don't really feel like I'm new. I'm just glad people still see me as fresh. I wish there was a 'fresh country artist category' rather than 'new.'
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For missing a 10 minute swim - I think it was out of order really.
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There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.