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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
Imbecility
Absurd
Atheist
Atheism
Close
Religion
Comes

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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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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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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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