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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
Public
American
Underestimating
Underestimate
Intelligence

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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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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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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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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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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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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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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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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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