H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
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A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
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Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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Jury - A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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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.
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Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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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.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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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.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.