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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

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
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Two
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Main
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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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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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
H. L. Mencken
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
H. L. Mencken
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
H. L. Mencken
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
H. L. Mencken
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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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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
H. L. Mencken
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
H. L. Mencken
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
H. L. Mencken
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
H. L. Mencken
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
H. L. Mencken
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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
H. L. Mencken
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
H. L. Mencken