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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

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
Historian
Novelists
Historical
History
Unsuccessful
Novelist

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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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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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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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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 Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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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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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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