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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.

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
Comes
Imbecility
Absurd
Atheist
Atheism
Close
Religion

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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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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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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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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 now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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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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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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