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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

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
Hold
Atheistic
Clear
Fundamentally
Religion
Fairness
Truth
Opposed
Everything
Atheist
Love
Honesty
Thinking
Atheism
Courage
Veneration

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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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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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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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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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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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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 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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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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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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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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