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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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
Parent
Religion
Evil
Penance
Family
Sunday
School
Spirituality
Children
Prison
Conscience
Parents

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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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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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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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