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Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
H. L. Mencken -
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. Mencken
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What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.
H. L. Mencken -
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
H. L. Mencken -
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
H. L. Mencken -
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
H. L. Mencken -
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
H. L. Mencken -
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
H. L. Mencken
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H. L. Mencken -
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
H. L. Mencken -
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H. L. Mencken -
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
H. L. Mencken -
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
H. L. Mencken -
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
H. L. Mencken
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Here is tragedy-and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
H. L. Mencken -
There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. Mencken -
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken -
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H. L. Mencken -
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken -
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken
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Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
H. L. Mencken -
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
H. L. Mencken -
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
H. L. Mencken -
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. Mencken