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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
Really
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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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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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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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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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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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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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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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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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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Every man is his own hell.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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