H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 35

• Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

  H. L. Mencken

  Love, Children, Men

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

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• Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Laughing, Comedian

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy". Book by H. L. Mencken, ch. 30, 1949.

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• The best client is a scared millionaire.

  H. L. Mencken

  Clients, Scared, Millionaire

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• To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, Men, Giving

  Smart Set, Dec. 1920

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• Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals

  H. L. Mencken

  Time, Justice, Fields

  A Book of Prefaces ch. 4 (1917)

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• The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Essence, Breathing

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• It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind

  H. L. Mencken

  Powerful, Inspiration, Years

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• The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

  H. L. Mencken

  Military, War, Party

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.314, Knopf

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• Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dog, Easy, Canine

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• If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.

  H. L. Mencken

  Golf, Men, White

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• The truth is . . . that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Book, Reading

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

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• In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.

  H. L. Mencken

  Kings, Political, Quality

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• A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, People, Political

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

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• Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

  H. L. Mencken

  Science, Intellectual, Demand

  'Minority Report'. Collected in Notebooks (1956).

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• The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.

  H. L. Mencken

  Forever, Superstitions, Way

  "Aftermath". "The Baltimore Sun" Newspaper, September 14, 1925.

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• As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.

  H. L. Mencken

  Long, Alcohol, Complaining

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• After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Belief, Be Good

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• Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavailer."

  H. L. Mencken

  Jobs, Work, Writing

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• There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Health, Men

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• The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

  H. L. Mencken

  Lying, Men, Progress

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• A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin or when he sees silver he looks for the cloud it lines. A wise happy person does the exact opposite.

  H. L. Mencken

  Wise, Gratitude, Flower

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• A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

  H. L. Mencken

  Children, Years, Poet

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.19, Knopf

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• Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Success, Lying

  H. L. Mencken (1924). “Prejudices Fourth Series”

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• I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.

  H. L. Mencken

  Agnostic, Detest

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• What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fear, Reflection, Issues

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

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