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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

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
Deny
Argument
Necessary
Simple
Dispose
Problem
Formula
Formulas
Familiar
Exists

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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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