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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken -
If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
H. L. Mencken
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
H. L. Mencken -
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken -
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken -
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
H. L. Mencken -
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. Mencken -
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
H. L. Mencken
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Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
H. L. Mencken -
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
H. L. Mencken -
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
H. L. Mencken -
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.
H. L. Mencken -
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
H. L. Mencken -
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
H. L. Mencken
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
H. L. Mencken -
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
H. L. Mencken -
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
H. L. Mencken -
As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.
H. L. Mencken -
The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
H. L. Mencken -
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
H. L. Mencken -
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
H. L. Mencken -
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
H. L. Mencken -
Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
H. L. Mencken