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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

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
Freedom
Neat
Problem
Solution
Every
Ethics
Solutions
Moral
Wrong
Values
Simple

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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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