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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age. ...
by H. L. Mencken

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
- H. L. Mencken

Related topics: Cute Whimsey

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie.
I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- H.L. Mencken

We must respect the other fellow's religion,
but only in the sense and to the extent
that we respect his theory that
his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H. L. Mencken

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person
to reconcile himself to the idea that
after all God will not help him
- H. L. Mencken

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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

For centuries, theologians have been explaining
the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- H. L. Mencken

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- H. L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution,
but who would want to live in an institution?
- H. L. Mencken

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- H. L. Mencken

The worst government is often the most moral.
One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane.
But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
- H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- H. L. Mencken

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband
a month before she marries him
and what she thinks of him a year afterward,
and you will have the truth about him.
- H. L. Mencken

Morality is the theory that every human act
must be either right or wrong,
and that 99 % of them are wrong.
- H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- H. L. Mencken

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- H. L. Mencken

Puritanism. The haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken

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.
- H. L. Mencken

Life is a constant oscillation
between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
- H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem,
there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- H.L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief
in the occurrence of the improbable.
- H. L. Mencken

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
- H. L. Mencken

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
- H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always
a false front for the urge to rule.
- H. L. Mencken

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- H. L. Mencken

The believing mind is eternally impervious to evidence.
- H. L. Mencken

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.
- H. L. Mencken

If I am a legend, then why am I so lonely?
- Judy Garland

Half a truth is often a great lie.
- Benjamin Franklin

Mind what people do, not only what they say,
for deeds will betray a lie.
- Terry Goodkind

If evil be spoken of you
and it be true, correct yourself,
if it be a lie, laugh at it.
- Epictetus

Even the truth, when believed, is a lie.
You must experience the truth, not believe it.
- Werner Erhard

I do myself a greater injury in lying
than I do him of whom I tell a lie.
- Michel de Montaigne

The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal.
The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.
- Benjamin E. Mays

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie,
deliberate, contrived and dishonest,
but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
- John F. Kennedy

Greatness is not in where we stand,
but in what direction we are moving.
We must sail sometimes with the wind
and sometimes against it -
but sail we must,
and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The roots of all goodness lie
in the soil of appreciation for goodness.
- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

I want to share with you the three rules
that I have in order to accept an apprentice.
Rule Number 1: Don't believe me.
I don't want you to believe me
but I want you to listen and make choices - your choices.
If what I say, doesn't work for you, leave it.
But if it works for you and that's what you want, then make it yours.
Rule Number 2: Don't believe yourself.
Why? Because most of your belief system is a lie - it's not true.
And by believing yourself, you create all the limitations
that don't allow you to be what you really are.
Don't believe yourself. Listen to what you say,
listen to what you think, listen to what you believe.
And when you listen, open your ears, open your mind,
open your intelligence and make choices.
Rule 3 is, don't believe anybody else.
Don't believe them at all.
Open your ears and your mind; listen and make choices.
- don Miguel Ruiz

Don't lie down. Get up.
- Bono

We tell lies when we are afraid...
afraid of what we don't know,
afraid of what others will think,
afraid of what will be found out about us.
But every time we tell a lie,
the thing that we fear grows stronger.
- Williams Tad

A lie travels round the world while
truth is putting her boots on.
- French Proverb
(also attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and others)

Whenever I feel the need to exercise,
I lie down until it goes away.
- Robert Maynard Hutchins

The truest expression of a people
is in its dances and its music.
Bodies never lie.
- Agnes De Mille

A lie cannot live.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask "Why me?"
Then a voice answers "Nothing personal,
your name just happened to come up. -
- Charlie Brown, in Charles M. Schulz' cartoon Peanuts

Above all, don't lie to yourself.
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie
comes to a point that he cannot
distinguish the truth within him, or around him,
and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Liar is a strong word, but we are all liars.
Not in the sense of intentionally speaking untruths,
but in the sense of carrying so much historical
and emotional baggage that none of us is believable.
To lie means to speak an untruth,
and virtually everything that comes out of our mouth
is an untruth - an opinion, an assumption,
a point-of-view based on our past.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
- Pablo Picasso

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it.
- Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany)

The lion and the calf shall lie down together,
but the calf won't get much sleep.
- Woody Allen

People are stupid;
given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything.
Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie
because they want to believe it's true,
or because they are afraid it might be true.
- Terry Goodkind

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes
in every waking moment of their lives
to remind them that the lie of their inferiority
is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Treat those who are good with goodness,
and also treat those who are not good with goodness.
Thus goodness is attained.
Be honest to those who are honest,
and be also honest to those who are not honest.
Thus honesty is attained.
- Lao Tzu

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly.
It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.
- Henry Ford

Many persons have a wrong idea of
what constitutes true happiness.
It is not attained through self-gratification
but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller

True happiness... is not attained
through self-gratification,
but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller

Life is not easy for any of us.
But what of that?
We must have perseverance
and above all confidence in ourselves.
We must believe that we are gifted for something
and that this thing must be attained.
- Marie Curie

Peace cannot be achieved through violence,
it can only be attained through understanding.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled
with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare,
social justice can never be attained.
- Helen Keller

Existence needs you.
Without you, something will be missing
in existence and nobody can replace it.
Thats what gives you dignity,
that the whole existence will miss you.
- Osho

Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.
- Elbert Hubbard

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance
and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative
of the dignity of my high vocation,
and its many responsibilities.
Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way
to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
- Mother Teresa

This [the Holocaust] must never happen again. ...
Be vigilant about your rights.
Care about the rights and human dignity of others.
When the rights of any group, no matter how small,
no matter how marginal, are violated,
your liberty, your freedom is put at risk.
Let there never be a day when we cast about in horror
and have to ask the question, "How did it ever come to this?"
- Thomas Childers, Ph.D., Professor of History,
University of Pennsylvania, in the closing remarks
of his six-hour Teaching Company audio lecture series

And in the end, it's not
the years in your life that count,
it's the life in your years.
- Abraham Lincoln

It is never too late to become what you might have been.
- George Eliot

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
- Henry David Thoreau

Self-respect is not a function of size, age, or wealth.
Breathe deep, sing loud and sweet,
"I am me, I am unique, I am magnificent."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood
between sincere men of all denominations.
- Helen Keller

Age does not protect you from love.
But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
- Anais Nin

Life is to be taken lightly
by those who wish to be happy
and by those who wish to age gracefully.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
- Helen Keller

Thank you for visiting: Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age. ... by H. L. Mencken.

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie