H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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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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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.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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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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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.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.