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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

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
Others
Believe
Seldom
Believes
Sin
Mistake
Evil

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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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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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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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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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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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