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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
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Artist
Spelling
Art
Edits
True
Criticize
Nature
Proof
Function
Blue
Embellish
Reader
Impassioned
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Edit

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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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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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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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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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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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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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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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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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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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