1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken
- Author H. L. Mencken
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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- Author H. L. Mencken
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.
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I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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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.
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