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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

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
Christian
Superior
Christ
Superiors
Humorous
Dignity
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Church
Archbishop
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Attained
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Rank

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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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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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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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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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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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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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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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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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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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