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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.

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
Educational
Average
Intelligent
Avocation
Imagine
Puerile
Education
Schoolmaster
Must
Engaging
Always
Ass
Men
Essentially

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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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