H. L. Mencken Quotes
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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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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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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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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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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Time stays, we go.
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The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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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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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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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
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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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Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.
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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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Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
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Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.
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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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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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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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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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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.
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A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.