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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.

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
Jealous
Plainly
Superior
Aristotle
Superiors
Beethoven
Image
Bodily
Average
Perish
Made
Eager
Men
Frame
Superiority

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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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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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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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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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