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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
H. L. Mencken -
The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
H. L. Mencken
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H. L. Mencken -
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
H. L. Mencken -
Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
H. L. Mencken -
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
H. L. Mencken -
Remorse - Regret that one waited so long to do it.
H. L. Mencken -
The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
H. L. Mencken
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The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.
H. L. Mencken -
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
H. L. Mencken -
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
H. L. Mencken -
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
H. L. Mencken -
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
H. L. Mencken -
Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
H. L. Mencken
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Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. Mencken -
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
H. L. Mencken -
Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
H. L. Mencken -
It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
H. L. Mencken
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
H. L. Mencken -
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
H. L. Mencken