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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

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
Underestimating
Underestimate
Intelligence
Public
American

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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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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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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 theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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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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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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