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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

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
Age
Conventions
Religion
Opinions
Social
Curious
Live
Effect
Great
Atheism
Effects
Libertine
Opinion
Convention
Religious
Respected

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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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Why do men go to zoos?
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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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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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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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