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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
Unsuccessful
Novelist
Historian
Novelists
Historical
History

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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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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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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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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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