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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet 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
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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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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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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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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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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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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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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