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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.

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
Given
Neighbors
Sunday
Neighbor
Americans
Dead
Hell
Heaven
Wish
Wishing

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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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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 great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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