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

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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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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.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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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.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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