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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
Sin
Mistake
Evil
Others
Believe
Seldom
Believes

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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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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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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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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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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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