H. L. Mencken Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was brought up with beautiful music - Nat King Cole and Glen Miller from my dad, and my mum loved Judy Garland and Doris Day - brilliant stuff. Through my brothers and sisters I heard David Bowie and The Specials, The Carpenters, Meatloaf and The Rolling Stones.
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The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence.
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I don't need to be motivated by anybody. Never have.
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At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years.
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Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honour for me.
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If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.
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Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
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The idea of going on tour for the rest of my life with old works is not that exciting. As an artist I definitely think the work in future is going to be better than the work in the past, otherwise why do it?
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China is a country, still, of great contrast. While hundreds of millions of people are part of the middle class and yearn for things made in America - American brands, movies, music - there are other hundreds of millions of people throughout China who are living on the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day.
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My mum told me to have patience. It's about realising that when things aren't going the way you want them to, or you don't have inspiration, it will come.
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When I had cancer - of the colon first, followed by breast cancer and a mastectomy - my motto used to be 'Drips by day, Prada by night.' I felt that I had to grasp it in the same way as you'd take on any challenge.
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Musical theater is one of my passions.
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I got a tattoo saying 'Made in England' above my foot to represent that, that I felt like a doll for so long.
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I hope she misses the cut. She doesn't belong here.
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What's so crazy is when you give interviews to reporters that don't really care too much for you, basically what they're going to do is write what they want to write and discredit you. They're going to write and say what they want to say, no matter what you tell them.
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Our society wants things to grow, and our society wants things to become bigger and bigger. Everything has to be put under the spotlight.
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Don't depend on other people to be responsible for you. Don't make yourself stressed out over nonsensical things like material things.
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I'm generally competing with the ideal I have set for myself, and I've found that served me very well.
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I went to Vietnam during the Vietnam War to visit all the troops. We would fly into a hospital and serve mess to the guys, and we ate whatever they were eating. Then we slept there and flew out the next day to little bases where there were maybe 10 or 20 guys. Then we flew to another hospital.
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Your destiny is to fulfill those things upon which you focus most intently. So choose to keep your focus on that which is truly magnificent, beautiful, uplifting and joyful. Your life is always moving toward something.
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Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.
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If you're totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don't instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics - your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting.
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Our national fondness for celebrating the physical heroism of soldiers - the apparent readiness with which they sacrifice their lives to larger causes - eclipses the far less romantic displays of moral and intellectual fortitude that also distinguish so many of them. In turning them all into heroes, we have lost a sense of the individuality they also fight to preserve.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
