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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

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
Making
Devices
Newspapers
Ignorant
Ignorance
Crazy
Democracy
Crazier
Literature
Device
Freedom
Newspaper

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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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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.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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