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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.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Please
Homely
Memories
Depart
Literature
Epitaph
Eye
Sinner
Girl
Forgive
Thought
Ghost
Vale
Remember
Forgiving
Winking
Ever
Kindness
Wink

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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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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 men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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...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.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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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.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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