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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
Underestimate
Intelligence
Public
American
Underestimating

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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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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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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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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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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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