H. L. Mencken Quotes
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
Quotes to Explore
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We need more people working in the publishing industry itself who are people of colour.
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How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.
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The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
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I love diving into different skins, skins that make me feel deep emotions.
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If you eat something and get fat, you should be responsible for it. I think that is the attitude of the great majority of Americans, that you should be responsible for what you eat.
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When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since.
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I think there's plenty of evidence that we need to stop spewing so much carbon into the air, that we're contributing to climate change and that we ought to look for alternatives.
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A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
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My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
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Being attractive, it's not something I do consciously. It's incredibly flattering that people think I appeal to women. But that was a gift from my parents.
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In the last twelve years, we have come some distance towards reconciliation and the breaking down of disadvantage. Let us take encouragement from what has been achieved and set our minds and hearts to end the remaining roadblocks.
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You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.
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I feel very competitive with Robert Morse off-set. We often duke it out. He always wins.
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If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.
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When someone doesn't react to changes, the changes turn against him.
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Not many of my friends I had from college are playing in this league. Everybody knows it's a privilege, so you definitely don't knock it because you never know where you may end up.
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Tile is going to the landfill by the metric ton. All we have to do it gather it up, glue it down to the floor and grout it. Then you have a tile floor, and not just any tile floor: it's a mosaic of your own choosing.
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The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.
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Sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death.
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Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.
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We can't win at home. We can't win on the road. As general manager, I just can't figure out where else to play.
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I'm just more into playing golf. It's a great thing.
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
