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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

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
Imagine
Craftsman
Rich
Beethoven
Year
Genuine
Making
Artists
Artist
Produce
Film
Room
Today
Rooms
Passable
Years
Movies
Craftsmen

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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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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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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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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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