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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

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
Complete
Often
Indistinguishable
Masculinity
Stupidity

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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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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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