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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.

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
Humans
Majority
Minorities
Arrayed
Play
Capable
Divided
Differentiated
Taking
Finds
Antagonistic
Class
Plays
Sharply
Race
Vast
Mutually
Two
Resistance
Minority
Ideas
Painful
Traffic
Human
Thus
Classes

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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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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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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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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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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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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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
H. L. Mencken