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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.

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
Knowledge
Abominable
Christian
Serpent
Father
Scriptures
May
Accident
Make
Scripture
Thinking
Accidents
Atheism
Slimy
Sure
Sneaking

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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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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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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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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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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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