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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

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
Would
Cease
Stranger
Quickly
Fiction
Philosophy
Freedom
Truth
Used

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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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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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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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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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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 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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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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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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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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