H. L. Mencken Quotes
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
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In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
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Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.
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Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
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I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.
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The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.
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Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.