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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

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
Order
Achieved
Giving
Tension
Writing
Function
Feeling
Enjoys
Literature
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Enjoy
Attain
Write
Cows
Feelings
Milk

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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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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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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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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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