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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
Problem
Solution
Every
Ethics
Solutions
Moral
Wrong
Values
Simple
Freedom
Neat

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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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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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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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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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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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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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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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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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