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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Three
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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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 truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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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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