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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

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
Trouble
Idealism
Vision
Materialism
Teach
Pastor
Men
Chief
World
Chiefs
Curse
Pastors
Seriously
Hallucinations
Taking
Visions

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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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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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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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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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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 argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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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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