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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

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
Chiefs
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Books
Reading
Knowledge
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Book
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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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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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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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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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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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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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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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 late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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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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