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Quotes by H. L. Mencken

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  • A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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  • Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
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  • There comes a time when a man must spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.
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  • Democracy: The worship of jackals by jackasses.
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  • A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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  • Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.
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  • If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.
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  • Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
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  • Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another
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  • Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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  • To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia.
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  • Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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  • The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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  • All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
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  • It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
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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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  • He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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  • Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell.
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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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  • The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
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  • Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
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  • Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
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  • Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.
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  • Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.
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  • Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another.
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