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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Always
Democracy
Freedom
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Commandments
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Humorous
Facts
Pleasant
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Ten
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Must
Humor

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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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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 longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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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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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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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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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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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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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 Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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