H. L. Mencken Quotes
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I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor - Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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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.
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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.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
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Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.
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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.
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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.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
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A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
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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.
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Time stays, we go.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it; for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.