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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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
Trying
Make
Think
Thinking
Puritans
Objection
Puritan
Objections
Religion
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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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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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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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 can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
H. L. Mencken
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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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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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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