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

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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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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.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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