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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Room
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Today
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Craftsmen
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Beethoven
Year
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Making
Artists

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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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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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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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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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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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