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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

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
Failure
Theory
Literature
Taken
Seems
Succeeds
Children
Devil
Long
Soon
Men
Succeed

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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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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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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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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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