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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.

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
Dog
Going
Drinker
Men
Drinkers
Thinking
Dogs
World
Stopped
Beer
Drinking
Thinks

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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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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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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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