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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.

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
Liberty
Wisdom
Religion
Character
Even
Something
Valuable
Morality
Civilization

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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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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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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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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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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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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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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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