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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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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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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 saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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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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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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