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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

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
Fool
Safe
Literature
Seldom
Speak
Speaks
Always
Assume
Men
Assuming
Safety
Necessary

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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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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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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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