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#H.L. Mencken
alchemisoul · 1 year
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"The people I distrust the most are those who want to improve our lives but only have one way."
- Frank Herbert
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thepersonalquotes · 3 months
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A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
H.L. Mencken
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A summary of Ron DeSantis’s anti-education efforts in Florida.
         It is challenging to keep up with the evolving efforts by Ron DeSantis to destroy the educational system in Florida. In his most recent gambit, he is threatening to ban all Advanced Placement courses in Florida (as part of his feud with the College Board over the African American Studies course). Vox has published a comprehensive summary (current through Tuesday, February 14) of DeSantis’s efforts. See Vox, What DeSantis is doing to Florida schools, explained.
[h/t Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]
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"It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.“ 
 — H.L. Mencken
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more-than-ideas · 2 months
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“There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.”
-H. L. Mencken
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"Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman." -- H.L. Mencken
Example:
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thepersonalwords · 2 months
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H.L. Mencken
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quotelr · 1 month
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A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
H.L. Mencken
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The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
H.L. Mencken
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entheognosis · 21 days
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
H.L. Mencken
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davidhudson · 7 months
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H. L. Mencken, September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956.
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quote-bomber · 1 year
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“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...”
H.L. Mencken
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thequietabsolute · 6 months
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Even God, it appears, begins to profiteer.
— H. L. Mencken, on buying a new Bible after 40 years and finding it had tripled in price
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insidewarp · 1 year
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.
—H L Mencken, Notes on Democracy (1926)
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When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot make itself so readily felt, all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
—H.L. Mencken, from a column in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920, reproduced in H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe, p. 21.
[Robert Scott Horrton]
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fivestarhuman · 2 years
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Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
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“There is in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more resepct than any other opinions set. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.” – H.L. Mencken
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