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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Artist
Spelling
Art
Edits
True
Criticize
Nature
Proof
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Blue
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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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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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
H. L. Mencken
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H. L. Mencken
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H. L. Mencken
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken