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

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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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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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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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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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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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