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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

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
Certainly
Theology
Yielding
Ignorance
Yield
Yields
Hair
Granted
Snake
Turn
Ignorant
Pretense
Religious
False
Slight
Turns
Scientist
Snakes
Water
Horse
Bottle
Anything
However
Bottles
Pretenses

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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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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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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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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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