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I Know A Good Many Men Of Great Learning-that Is, Men Born With An Extraordinary Eagerness And Capacity To Acquire Knowledge. One And All, They Tell Me That They Can't Recall Learning Anything Of Any Value In School. All That Schoolmasters Managed To Accomplish With Them Was To Test And Determine The Amount Of Knowledge That They Had Already Acquired Independently-and Not Infrequently The Determination Was Made Clumsily And Inaccurately.

-H. L. Mencken

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I Know A Good

H. L. Mencken

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I Know A Good Many Men Of Great Learning-that Is, Men Born With An Extraordinary Eagerness And Capacity To Acquire Knowledge. One And All, They Tell Me That They Can't Recall Learning Anything Of Any Value In School. All That Schoolmasters Managed To Accomplish With Them Was To Test And Determine The Amount Of Knowledge That They Had Already Acquired Independently-and Not Infrequently The Determination Was Made Clumsily And Inaccurately.

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Who Will Argue That 98.6 Farenheit Is The Right Temperature For Man? As For Me, I Decline To Do It. It May Be That We Are All Actually Freezing Hence The Pervading Stupidity Of Mankind. At 110 Or 115 Degrees Even Archbishops Might Be Intelligent.

It Costs More To Maintain Ten Vices Than One Virtue.

Socialist: A Man Suffering From An Overwhelming Conviction To Believe What Is Not True.

Congress Consists Of One-third, More Or Less, Scoundrels; Two-thirds, More Or Less, Idiots; And Three-thirds, More Or Less, Poltroons.

Democracy Is The Theory That The Common People Know What They Want, And Deserve To Get It Good And Hard.

Democracies Have

They Have Taken The Care And Upbringing Of Children Out Of The Hands Of Parents, Where It Belongs, And Thrown It Upon A Gang Of Irresponsible And Unintelligent Quacks.

The Lunatic Fringe Wags The Underdog.

We Are Here And It Is Now. Further Than That, All Human Knowledge Is Moonshine.

It Is Not A Sign Of Communal Well-being When Men Turn To Their Government To Execute All Their Business For Them, But Rather A Sign Of Decay, As In The United States Today. The State, Indeed, Is But One Of The Devices That A Really Healthy Community Sets Up To Manage Its Affairs.

There Are No Ugly Cigars, Only Ugly Smokers.

Morality Is Nothing But A Struggle For Safety

Free Speech Is Too Dangerous To A Democracy To Be Permitted

Every Complex Problem Has A Simple Solution That Doesn't Work.

Some Boys Go To College And Eventually Succeed In Getting Out. Others Go To College And Never Succeed In Getting Out. The Latter Are Called Professors.

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.

The Common Argument That Crime Is Caused By Poverty Is A Kind Of Slander On The Poor.

There Is Always A Sheet Of Paper. There Is Always A Pen. There Is Always A Way Out.

Science, At Bottom, Is Really Anti-intellectual. It Always Distrusts Pure Reason, And Demands The Production Of Objective Fact.

Friendship Is A Common Belief In The Same Fallacies, Mountebanks And Hobgoblins.

The Real Man Lies In The Depths Of Subconscious.

The Motive Of Fear Is The Be-all And End-all Of Religion.

Absence Is The Dark-room In Which Lovers Develop Negatives.

Philosophy First Constructs A Scheme Of Happiness And Then Tries To Fit The World To It.

Wife: A Former Sweetheart.

Chopin--two Embalmers At Work Upon A Minor Poetthe Scent Of Tuberosesautumn Rain.

Sunday Is A Day Given Over By Americans To Wishing That The Themselves Were Dead And In Heaven, And That Their Neighbors Were Dead And In Hell.

The Prophesying Business Is Like Writing Fugues; It Is Fatal To Every One Save The Man Of Absolute Genius.

A Man Always Remembers His First Love With Special Tenderness, But After That He Begins To Bunch Them.

The Townspeople Are Morons, Yokels, Peasants And Genus Homo Boobiensis...surrounded By Gaping Primates From The Upland Vallies.

The Best Client Is A Scared Millionaire.

Setting Aside The Vast Herd Which Shows No Definable Character At All, It Seems To Me That The Minority Distinguished By What Is Commonly Regarded As An Excess Of Sin Is Very Much More Admirable Than The Minority Distinguished By An Excess Of Virtue. My Experience Of The World Has Taught Me That The Average Wine-bibbler Is A Far Better Fellow Than The Average Prohibitionist, And That The Average Rogue Is Better Company Than The Average Poor Drudge, And That The Worst White-slave Trader Of My Acquaintance Is A Decenter Man Than The Best Vice Crusader.

The Most Costly Of All Follies Is To Believe Passionately In The Palpably Not True. It Is The Chief Occupation Of Mankind.

People Say We Need Religion When What They Really Mean Is We Need Police.

Women Always Excel Men In That Sort Of Wisdom Which Comes From Experience. To Be A Woman Is In Itself A Terrible Experience.

No Man Ever Quite Believes In Any Other Man. One May Believe In An Idea Absolutely, But Not In A Man.

There Is In Writing The Constant Joy Of Sudden Discovery, Of Happy Accident.

The Mistake That Is Made Always Runs The Other Way. Because The Plain People Are Able To Speak And Understand, And Even, In Many Cases, To Read And Write, It Is Assumed That They Have Ideas In Their Heads, And An Appetite For More. This Assumption Is A Folly.

The Chief Contribution Of Protestantism To Human Thought Is Its Massive Proof That God Is A Bore.

The American People, Taking One With Another, Constitute The Most Timorous, Snivelling, Poltroonish, Ignominious Mob Of Serfs And Goosesteppers Ever Gathered Under One Flag In Christendom Since The End Of The Middle Ages.

Liberals Have Many Tails And Chase Them All.

Here Is One Of The Fundamental Defects Of American Fiction--perhaps The One Character That Sets It Off Sharply From All Other Known Kinds Of Contemporary Fiction. It Habitually Exhibits, Not A Man Of Delicate Organization In Revolt Against The Inexplicable Tragedy Of Existence, But A Man Of Low Sensibilities And Elemental Desires Yielding Himself Gladly To His Environment, And So Achieving What, Under A Third-rate Civilization, Passes For Success. To Get On: This Is The Aim. To Weigh And Reflect, To Doubt And Rebel: This Is The Thing To Be Avoided.

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Evil: That Which One Believes Of Others. It Is A Sin To Believe Evil Of Others, But It Is Seldom A Mistake

When You Sympathize With A Married Woman You Either Make Two Enemies Or Gain One Wife And One Friend.

The Doctrine That The Cure For The Evils Of Democracy Is More Democracy Is Like Saying That The Cure Of Crime Is More Crime.

If, After I Depart This Vale, You Ever Remember Me And Have Thought To Please My Ghost, Forgive Some Sinner And Wink Your Eye At Some Homely Girl.

The Fact That A Human Brain Of High Amperage, Otherwise Highly Efficient, May Have A Hole In It Is Surely Not A Secret.

The Opera Is To Music What A Bawdy House Is To A Cathedral.

[government] Is Apprehended, Not As A Committee Of Citizens Chosen To Carry On The Communal Business Of The Whole Population, But As A Separate And Autonomous Corporation, Mainly Devoted To Exploiting The Population For The Benefit Of Its Own Members.

The Priest, Realistically Considered, Is The Most Immoral Of Men, For He Is Always Willing To Sacrifice Every Other Sort Of Good To The One Good Of His Arcanum - The Vague Body Of Mysteries That He Calls The Truth.

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Man Makes Love By Braggadocio, And Woman Makes Love By Listening.

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.

Osteopath--one Who Argues That All Human Ills Are Caused By The Pressure Of Hard Bone Upon Soft Tissue. The Proof Of His Theory Isto Be Found In The Heads Of Those Who Believe It.

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Only To Often On Meeting Scientific Men, Even Those Of Genuine Distiction, One Finds That They Are Dull Fellows And Very Stupid. They Know One Thing To Excess; They Know Nothing Else. Pursuing Facts Too Doggedly And Unimaginatively, They Miss All The Charming Things That Are Not Facts. ... Too Much Learning, Like Too Little Learning, Is An Unpleasant And Dangerous Thing.

Never Argue With A Man Whose Job Depends On Not Being Convinced.

The Theatre, When All Is Said And Done, Is Not Life In Miniature, But Life Enormously Magnified, Life Hideously Exaggerated.

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I Hate All Sports As Rabidly As A Person Who Likes Sports Hates Common Sense.

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It Is The Natural Tendency Of The Ignorant To Believe What Is Not True. In Order To Overcome That Tendency It Is Not Sufficient To Exhibit The True; It Is Also Necessary To Expose And Denounce The False.

In My Day A Reporter Who Took An Assignment Was Wholly On His Own Until He Got Back To The Office, And Even Then He Was Little Molested Until His Copy Was Turned In At The Desk; Today He Tends To Become Only A Homunculus At The End Of A Telephone Wire, And The Reduction Of His Observations To Prose Is Commonly Farmed Out To Literary Castrati Who Never Leave The Office, And Hence Never Feel The Wind Of The World In Their Faces Or See Anything With Their Own Eyes.

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Every Reader Of The Dreiser Novels Must Cherish Astounding Specimens--of Awkward, Platitudinous Marginalia, Of Whole Scenes Spoiled By Bad Writing, Of Phrases As Brackish As So Many Lumps Of Sodium Hyposulphite.

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The Feelings That Beethoven Put Into His Music Were The Feelings Of A God. There Was Something Olympian In His Snarls And Rages, And There Was A Touch Of Hellfire In His Mirth.

The Christian Church, In Its Attitude Toward Science, Shows The Mind Of A More Or Less Enlightened Man Of The Thirteenth Century. It No Longer Believes That The Earth Is Flat, But It Is Still Convinced That Prayer Can Cure After Medicine Fails.

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An Author, Like Any Other So-called Artist, Is A Man In Whom The Normal Vanity Of All Men Is So Vastly Exaggerated That He Finds It A Sheer Impossibility To Hold It In. His Over-powering Impulse Is To Gyrate Before His Fellow Men, Flapping His Wings And Emitting Defiant Yells. This Being Forbidden By The Police Of All Civilized Nations, He Takes It Out By Putting His Yells On Paper. Such Is The Thing Called Self-expression.

Government Is Actually The Worst Failure Of Civilized Man.

What I Got In Sunday School ... Was Simply A Firm Conviction That The Christian Faith Was Full Of Palpable Absurdities, And The Christian God Preposterous.... The Act Of Worship, As Carried On By Christians, Seems To Me To Be Debasing Rather Than Ennobling. It Involves Groveling Before A Being Who, If He Really Exists, Deserves To Be Denounced Instead Of Respected.

The Objection Of The Scandalmonger Is Not That She Tells Of Racy Doings, But That She Pretends To Be Indignant About Them.

Justice Is What You Get When You Run Out Of Money.

[referring To Fdr] If He Became Convinced Tomorrow That Coming Out For Cannibalism Would Get Him The Votes He Needs So Sorely, He Would Begin Fattening A Missionary In The White House Yard Come Wednesday.

The Puritan, Of Course, Is Not Entirely Devoid Of Aesthetic Feeling. He Has A Taste For Good Form; He Responds To Style; He Is Even Capable Of Something Approaching A Purely Aesthetic Emotion. But He Fears This Aesthetic Emotion As An Insinuating Distraction From His Chief Business In Life: The Sober Consideration Of The All-important Problem Of Conduct. Art Is A Temptation, A Seduction, A Lorelei, And The Good Man May Safely Have Traffic With It When It Is Broken To Moral Uses--in Other Words, When Its Innocence Is Pumped Out Of It, And It Is Purged Of Gusto.

I Roll Out Of My Couch Every Morning With The More Agreeable Expectations.

A Sense Of Humor Always Withers In The Presence Of The Messianic Delusion, Like Justice And The Truth In Front Of Patriotic Passion.

Politics, Under A Democracy, Reduces Itself To A Mere Struggle For Office By Flatterers Of The Proletariat; Even When A Superior Man Prevails At That Disgusting Game He Must Prevail At The Cost Of His Self-respect. Not Many Superior Men Make The Attempt. The Average Great Captain Of The Rabble, When He Is Not Simply A Weeper Over Irremediable Wrongs, Is A Hypocrite So Far Gone That He Is Unconscious Of His Own Hypocrisy.. A Slimy Fellow, Offensive To The Nose.

I Know A Good Many Men Of Great Learning-that Is, Men Born With An Extraordinary Eagerness And Capacity To Acquire Knowledge. One And All, They Tell Me That They Can't Recall Learning Anything Of Any Value In School. All That Schoolmasters Managed To Accomplish With Them Was To Test And Determine The Amount Of Knowledge That They Had Already Acquired Independently-and Not Infrequently The Determination Was Made Clumsily And Inaccurately.

A Prohibitionist Is The Sort Of Man One Couldn't Care To Drink With, Even If He Drank.

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.

Why Do Men Go To Zoos?

The Pedant And The Priest Have Always Been The Most Expert Of Logicians - And The Most Diligent Disseminators Of Nonsense And Worse.

A Gentlemen Is One Who Never Strikes A Woman Without Provocation.

Men Have A Much Better Time Of It Than Women. For One Thing, They Marry Later; For Another Thing, They Die Earlier.

Life Is A Dead-end Street.

Any Defeat, However Trivial, May Be Fatal To A Savior Of The Plain People. They Never Admire A Messiah With A Bloody Nose.

Such Is The Art Of Writing As Dreiser Understands It And Practices It--an Endless Piling Up Of Minutiae, An Almost Ferocious Tracking Down Of Ions, Electrons And Molecules, An Unshakable Determination To Tell It All. One Is Amazed By The Mole-like Diligence Of The Man, And No Less By His Exasperating Disregard For The Ease Of His Readers.

No Government Is Ever Really In Favor Of So-called Civil Rights. It Always Tries To Whittle Them Down. They Are Preserved Under All Governments, Insofar As They Survive At All, By Special Classes Of Fanatics, Often Highly Dubious.

The Truly Civilized Man Is Always Skeptical And Tolerant, In This Field As In All Others. His Culture Is Based On 'i Am Not Too Sure'.

There Are Some People Who Read Too Much: The Bibliobibuli.

We Must Think Of Human Progress, Not As Of Something Going On In The Race In General, But As Something Going On In A Small Minority, Perpetually Beleaguered In A Few Walled Towns. Now And Then The Horde Of Barbarians Outside Breaks Through, And We Have An Armed Effort To Halt The Process. That Is, We Have A Reformation, A French Revolution, A War For Democracy, A Great Awakening. The Minority Is Decimated And Driven To Cover. But A Few Survive- And A Few Are Enough To Carry On.

There Are Two Kinds Of Europeans: The Smart Ones, And Those Who Stayed Behind.

The Only Really Happy Folk Are Married Women And Single Men.

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.

All American Wars (except The Civil War) Have Been Fought With The Odds Overwhelmingly In Favor Of The Americans. In The History Of Armed Combat Such Affairs As The Mexican And Spanish-american Wars Must Be Ranked, Not As Wars At All, But As Organized Assassinations. In The Two World Wars, No American Faced A Bullet Until His Adversaries Had Been Worn Down By Years Of Fighting Others.

School Teachers, Taking Them By And Large, Are Probably The Most Ignorant And Stupid Class Of Men In The Whole Group Of Mental Workers.

The Truth Is That The Scientific Value Of Polar Exploration Is Greatly Exaggerated. The Thing That Takes Men On Such Hazardous Trips Is Really Not Any Thirst For Knowledge, But Simply A Yearning For Adventure. ... A Polar Explorer Always Talks Grandly Of Sacrificing His Fingers And Toes To Science. It Is An Amiable Pretention, But There Is No Need To Take It Seriously.

The Fact Is That The Average Man's Love Of Liberty Is Nine-tenths Imaginary, Exactly Like His Love Of Sense, Justice And Truth.

Not By Accident, You May Be Sure, Do The Christian Scriptures Make The Father Of Knowledge A Serpent - Slimy, Sneaking And Abominable.

No Married Man Is Genuinely Happy If He Has To Drink Worse Whisky Than He Used To Drink When He Was Single.

An Altruist Is One Who Would Be Sincerely Sorry To See His Neighbor's Children Devoured By Wolves.

Clergyman: A Ticket Speculator Outside The Gates Of Heaven.

To Be In Love Is Merely To Be In A State Of Perceptual Anesthesia - To Mistake An Ordinary Young Woman For A Goddess.

For Me To Go Into Politics Would Be Like Sending A Virgin Into A House Of Ill-repute.

Man Weeps To Think That He Will Die So Soon; Woman, That She Was Born So Long Ago.

Bridges Would Not Be Safer If Only People Who Knew The Proper Definition Of A Real Number Were Allowed To Design Them.

Nietzsche, To The End Of His Days, Remained A Russian Pastor's Son, And Hence Two-thirds Of A Puritan; He Erected His War Upon Holiness, Toward The End, Into A Sort Of Holy War.

The Cure For The Evils Of Democracy Is More Democracy.

Democracies Have

This Combat Between Proletariat And Plutocracy Is, After All, Itself A Civil War. Two Inferiorities Struggle For The Privilege Of Polluting The World.

The So-called Philosophy Of India Is Even More Blowsy And Senseless Than The Metaphysics Of The West. It Is At War With Everything We Know Of The Workings Of The Human Mind, And With Every Sound Idea Formulated By Mankind. If It Prevailed In The Whole Modern World We'd Still Be In The Thirteenth Century; Nay, We'd Be Back Among The Egyptians Of The Pyramid Age. Its Only Coherent Contribution To Western Thought Has Been Theosophy-and Theosophy Is As Idiotic As Christian Science. It Has Absolutely Nothing To Offer A Civilized White Man.

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. Is It, Perchance, Cherished By Persons Who Should Know Better? Then Their Folly Should Be Brought Out Into The Light Of Day, And Exhibited There In All Its Hideousness Until They Flee From It, Hiding Their Heads In Shame.

Government, In Its Very Essence, Is Opposed To All Increase In Knowledge. Its Tendency Is Always Towards Permanence And Against Change...[t]he Progress Of Humanity, Far From Being The Result Of Government, Has Been Made Entirely Without Its Aid And In The Face If Its Constant And Bitter Opposition.

A Progressive Is One Who Is In Favor Of More Taxes Instead Of Less, More Bureaus And Jobholders, More Paternalism And Meddling, More Regulation Of Private Affairs And Less Liberty. In General, He Would Be Inclined To Regard The Repeal Of Any Tax As Outrageous.

To Wage A War For A Purely Moral Reason Is As Absurd As To Ravish A Woman For A Purely Moral Reason

The Public ... Demands Certainties ... But There Are Not Certainties

Decision Making

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A Politician Normally Prospers Under Democracy In Proportion ... As He Excels In The Invention Of Imaginary Perils And Imaginary Defenses Against Them.

The Harsh, Useful Things Of The World, From Pulling Teeth To Digging Potatoes, Are Best Done By Men Who Are As Starkly Sober As So Many Convicts In The Death-house, But The Lovely And Useless Things, The Charming And Exhilarating Things, Are Best Done By Men With, As The Phrase Is, A Few Sheets In The Wind.

People Do Not Expect To Find Chastity In A Whorehouse. Why, Then, Do They Expect To Find Honesty And Humanity In Government, A Congeries Of Institutions Whose Modus Operandi Consists Of Lying, Cheating, Stealing, And If Need Be, Murdering Those Who Resist?

The Average Man Never Really Thinks From End To End Of His Life. The Mental Activity Of Such People Is Only A Mouthing Of Clichés.

Poverty Is A Soft Pedal Upon The Branches Of Human Activity, Not Excepting The Spiritual.

No Article Of Faith Is Proof Against The Disintegrating Effects Of Increasing Information; One Might Almost Describe The Acquirement Of Knowledge As A Process Of Disillusion.

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.

Jury - A Group Of 12 People, Who, Having Lied To The Judge About Their Health, Hearing, And Business Engagements, Have Failed To Fool Him.

The Great Masses Of Men, Though Theoretically Free, Are Seen To Submit Supinely To Oppression And Exploitation Of A Hundred Abhorrent Sorts. Have They No Means Of Resistance? Obviously They Have. The Worst Tyrant, Even Under Democratic Plutocracy, Has But One Throat To Slit. The Moment The Majority Decided To Overthrow Him He Would Be Overthrown. But The Majority Lacks The Resolution; It Cannot Imagine Taking The Risks.

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The Storm Center Of Lawlessness In Every American State Is The State Capitol. It Is There That The Worst Crimes Are Committed; It Is There That Lawbreaking Attains To The Estate And Dignity Of A Learned Profession; It Is There That Contempt For The Laws Is Engendered, Fostered, And Spread Broadcast.

All Talk Of Winning The People By Appealing To Their Intelligence, Of Conquering Them By Impeccable Syllogism, Is So Much Moonshine.

There Is No Record In The History Of A Nation That Ever Gained Anything Valuable By Being Unable To Defend Itself.

I Believe That All Government Is Evil, In That All Government Must Necessarily Make War On Liberty, And That The Democratic Government Is At Least As Bad As Any Of The Other Forms.

The Cosmos Is A Gigantic Flywheel Making 10,000 Revolutions Per Minute. Man Is A Sick Fly Taking A Dizzy Ride On It.

The Legislature, Like The Executive, Has Ceased To Be Even The Creature Of The People: It Is The Creature Of Pressure Groups, And Most Of Them, It Must Be Manifest, Are Of Dubious Wisdom And Even More Dubious Honesty. Laws Are No Longer Made By A Rational Process Of Public Discussion; They Are Made By A Process Of Blackmail And Intimidation, And They Are Executed In The Same Manner. The Typical Lawmaker Of Today Is A Man Wholly Devoid Of Principle...

Evangelical Christianity, As Everyone Knows, Is Founded Upon Hate, As The Christianity Of Christ Was Founded Upon Love.

Women Hate Revolutions And Revolutionists. They Like Men Who Are Docile, And Well-regarded At The Bank, And Never Late At Meals.

The Instant I Reach Heaven, I'm Going To Speak To God Very Sharply.

The Most Valuable Of All Human Possessions, Next To A Superior And Disdainful Air, Is The Reputation Of Being Well-to-do.

It Takes No More Actual Sagacity To Carry On The Everyday Hawking And Haggling Of The World, Or To Ladle Out Its Normal Doses Of Bad Medicine And Worse Law, Than It Takes To Operate A Taxicab Or Fry A Pan Of Fish.

There Is A Saying In Baltimore That Crabs May Be Prepared In Fifty Ways And That All Of Them Are Good.

Unquestionably, There Is Progress. The Average American Now Pays Out Twice As Much In Taxes As He Formerly Got In Wages.

I Believe In Only One Thing: Liberty; But I Do Not Believe In Liberty Enough To Want To Force It Upon Anyone.

Since The Early Days, [the Church] Has Thrown Itself Violently Against Every Effort To Liberate The Body And Mind Of Man. It Has Been, At All Times And Everywhere, The Habitual And Incorrigible Defender Of Bad Governments, Bad Laws, Bad Social Theories, Bad Institutions. It Was, For Centuries, An Apologist For Slavery, As It Was An Apologist For The Divine Right Of Kings.

Man Is Always Looking For Someone To Boast To; Woman Is Always Looking For A Shoulder To Put Her Head On.

The Objection To Puritans Is Not That They Try To Make Us Think As They Do, But That They Try To Make Us Do As They Think.

As Long As The Southern Colleges Have Revivals On Their Campuses And Students Get Converted To Methodism And Join The Ymca And Are Accepted As Gentlemen, It Will Be Impossible To Think Of The South As Civilized...the Educated Folk Of The Old South Took Theology Lightly, And Religion To Them Was Hardly More Than A Charming Ritual, Useful On Solemn Occassions.

The Federal [bank Deposit] Insurance Scheme Has Worked Up To Now Simply And Solely Because There Have Been Very Few Bank Failures. The Next Time We Have A Pestilence Of Them It Will Come To Grief Quickly Enough, And If The Good Banks Escape Ruin With The Bad Ones It Will Be Only Because The Taxpayer Foots The Bill.

One Is Conscious Of No Brave And Noble Earnestness In It, Of No Generalized Passion For Intellectual And Spiritual Adventure, Of No Organized Determination To Think Things Out. What Is There Is A Highly Self-conscious And Insipid Correctness, A Bloodless Respectability Submergence Of Matter In Manner--in Brief, What Is There Is The Feeble, Uninspiring Quality Of German Painting And English Music.

Elections Are Futures Markets In Stolen Property.

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I Drink Exactly As Much As I Want, And One Drink More.

The War On Privilege Will Never End. Its Next Grat Campaign Will Be Against The Special Privileges Of The Underprivileged.

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.

No Romantic Novel Ever Written In America, By Man Or Woman, Is One Half So Beautiful As My Ántonia.

For Every Problem, There Is A Solution That Is Simple, Neat, And Wrong.

The Only Kind Of Freedom That The Mob Can Imagine Is Freedom To Annoy And Oppress Its Betters, And That Is Precisely The Kind That We Mainly Have.

Man Is A Beautiful Machine That Works Very Badly. He Is Like A Watch Of Which The Most That Can Be Said Is That Its Cosmetic Effect Is Good.

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A Politician Is An Animal Which Can Sit On A Fence And Yet Keep Both Ears To The Ground.

Giving Every Man A Vote Has No More Made Men Wise And Free Than Christianity Has Made Them Good.

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Every Election Is A Sort Of Advance Auction Sale Of Stolen Goods.

Truth - Something Somehow Discreditable To Someone.

If I Ever Mary, It Will Be On A Suddn Impulse - As Aman Shoots Himself

At A Time When The Respectable Bourgeois Youngsters Of My Generation Were College Freshmen, Oppressed By Simian Sophomores And Affronted With Balderdash Daily And Hourly By Chalky Pedagogues, I Was At Large In A Wicked Seaport Of Half A Million People, With A Front Seat At Every Public Show, As Free Of The Night As Of Day, And Getting Earfuls Of Instruction In A Hundred Giddy Arcana, None Of Them Taught In Schools.... [but] If I Neglected The Humanities, I Was Meanwhile Laying In All The Worldly Wisdom Of A Police Lieutenant, A Bartender, A Shyster Lawyer, Or A Midwife.

Poetry Is A Comforting Piece Of Fiction Set To More Or Less Lascivious Music.

A Skeptic As To All Ideas, Including Especially My Own, I Have Never Suffered A Pang When The Ideas Of Some Other Imbecile Prevailed.

Government Today Is Growing Too Strong To Be Safe. There Are No Longer Any Citizens In The World There Are Only Subjects. They Work Day In And Day Out For Their Masters They Are Bound To Die For Their Masters At Call. Out Of This Working And Dying They Tend To Get Less And Less.

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.

No Man Of Honor Ever Quite Lives Up To His Code, Any More Than A Moral Man Manages To Avoid Sin.

Most People Are Unable To Write Because They Are Unable To Think, And They Are Unable To Think Because They Congenitally Lack The Equipment To Do So, Just As They Congenitally Lack The Equipment To Fly Over The Moon.

A Dull, Dark, Depressing Day In Winter: The Whole World Looks Like A Methodist Church At Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.

There Is No Record In Human History Of A Happy Philosopher: They Exist Only In Romantic Legend.

It Is The Dull Man Who Is Always Sure, And The Sure Man Who Is Always Dull.

To Large Numbers Of American Citizens Life In Certain Parts Of The Country Becomes Intolerably Hazardous. They May Be Seized On Any Pretext, However Flimsy, And Put To Death With Horrible Tortures. No Government Pretending To Be Civilized Can Go On Condoning Such Atrocities. Either It Must Make Every Possible Effort To Put Them Down Or It Must Suffer The Scorn And Contempt Of Christendom.

Opera In English Is, In The Main, Just About As Sensible As Baseball In Italian.

Love Is Like War: Easy To Begin But Very Hard To Stop.

We Suffer Most When The White House Busts With Ideas.

The Older I Grow The More I Distrust The Familiar Doctrine That Age Brings Wisdom.

Immorality: The Morality Of Those Who Are Having A Better Time.

I Believe In Only One Thing And That Thing Is Human Liberty. If Ever A Man Is To Achieve Anything Like Dignity, It Can Happen Only If Superior Men Are Given Absolute Freedom To Think What They Want To Think And Say What They Want To Say. I Am Against Any Man And Any Organization Which Seeks To Limit Or Deny That Freedom ... The Superior Man Can Be Sure Of Freedom Only If It Is Given To All Men.

Some Time Ago A Publisher Told Me That There Are Four Kinds Of Books That Seldom, If Ever, Lose Money In The United States--first,murder Stories; Secondly, Novels In Which The Heroine Is Forcibly Overcome By The Hero; Thirdly, Volumes On Spiritualism, Occultism And Other Such Claptrap, And Fourthly, Books On Lincoln.

Men Always Try To Make Virtues Of Their Weaknesses. Fear Of Death And Fear Of Life Both Become Piety.

In The Long Run All Battles Are Lost, And So Are All Wars.

Jealousy Is A Keen Observer, But Looks For All The Wrong Signs.

What Are The Characters That I Discern Most Clearly In The So-called Anglo-saxon Type Of Man? I May Answer At Once That Two Stickout Above All Others. One Is His Curious And Apparently Incurable Incompetence--his Congenital Inability To Do Any Difficult Thing Easily And Well, Whether It Be Isolating A Bacillus Or Writing A Sonata. The Other Is His Astounding Susceptibility To Fears And Alarms--in Short, His Hereditary Cowardice.... There Is No Record In History Of Any Anglo-saxon Nation Entering Upon Any Great War Without Allies.

The Only Liberty An Inferior Man Really Cherishes Is The Liberty To Quit Work, Stretch Out In The Sun, And Scratch Himself.

I Go On Working For The Same Reason That A Hen Goes On Laying Eggs.

Economic Independence Is The Foundation Of The Only Sort Of Freedom Worth A Damn

Philadelphia Is The Most Pecksniffian Of American Cities, And Thus Probably Leads The World.

I Believe That Religion, Generally Speaking, Has Been A Curse To Mankind.

...no Man Of Genuinely Superior Intelligence Has Ever Been An Actor. Even Supposing A Young Man Of Appreciable Mental Powers To Be Lured Upon The Stage, As Philosophers Are Occasionally Lured Into Bordellos, His Mind Would Be Inevitably And Almost Immediately Destroyed By The Gaudy Nonsense Issuing From His Mouth Every Night.

One May No More Live In The World Without Picking Up The Moral Prejudices Of The World Than One Will Be Able To Go To Hell Without Perspiring.

Morality Is The Theory That Every Human Act Must Be Either Right Or Wrong, And That 99 % Of Them Are Wrong.

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