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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

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
Youth
Terrible
Shams
Eyes
Devoid
Though
Sharp
Knowledge
Sees
Eye
Lack
May
Intelligence

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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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