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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.

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
Literature
Actually
Exposed
Times
Error
Art
Arts
Truth
Discovered
Life
Errors
Nine
Ten

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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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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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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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