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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

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
Gossip
Tells
Indignant
Pretends
Objection
Doings
Objections

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Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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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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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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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
H. L. Mencken
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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