H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 16

• The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

  H. L. Mencken

  Gossip, Indignant, Doings

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• Evil is that which one believes of others.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Evil

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.617, Vintage

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• The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

  H. L. Mencken

  Marriage, Wedding, Men

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

  H. L. Mencken

  Framed, Hypothesis, Accounts

  "The American Mercury" Magazine, February 1926.

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• Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

  H. L. Mencken

  Happiness, Marriage, Men

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• The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.

  H. L. Mencken

  Two, Race, Class

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• The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.

  H. L. Mencken

  Editors, Common Sense, Giving

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• All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

  H. L. Mencken

  Order, Religion, Atheism

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.89, Vintage

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• I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

  H. L. Mencken

  Thinking, Racism, People

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• When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sympathy, Women, Two

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.620, Vintage

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• In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

  H. L. Mencken

  Love, Real, Women

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.620, Vintage

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• As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

  H. L. Mencken

  Love, Hate, Heart

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• A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.

  H. L. Mencken

  Gentleman, Strikes, Provocation

  H.L. Mencken “A little book in C major”, Рипол Классик

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• Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

  H. L. Mencken

  Mother, Freedom, Law

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing". Book edited by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

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• What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Effort, Political

  H.L. MENCKEN (1958). “PREJUDICES A SELECTION”

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• He who eats alone chokes alone.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dining Alone, Choke, Arabian

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• A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor

  H. L. Mencken

  Doctors, Political, Tin

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• A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.

  H. L. Mencken

  Depressing, Prayer, Dark

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.13, Knopf

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• School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, Believe, Learning

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.308, Vintage

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• America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

  H. L. Mencken

  America, Inability, Comedy

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• I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.

  H. L. Mencken

  Government, Individual, Knows

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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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Wise, Running, Wisdom

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.80, Knopf

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• Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

  H. L. Mencken

  Music, Baseball, Italian

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• The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.

  H. L. Mencken

  War, United States, World

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Diary of H. L. Mencken”, p.682, Vintage

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• Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.

  H. L. Mencken

  Kings, Animal, Men

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.128, Cosimo, Inc.

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