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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.

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
Forget
Sheriffs
Lasts
Converted
Common
Mount
Last
Farewell
Words
Goodbye
Anything
Add
Scaffold
Never
Justice
Adieu
Life
Gone
Sheriff

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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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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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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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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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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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