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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
Blue
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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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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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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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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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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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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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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