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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
Literature
Seldom
Speak
Speaks
Always
Assume
Men
Assuming
Safety
Necessary
Fool
Safe
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
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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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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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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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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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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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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