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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 one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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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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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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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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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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