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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
Thought
Bores
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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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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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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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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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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 movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
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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 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.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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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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