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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.

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
Even
Meaning
Controversy
Seem
Unable
Almost
Sentence
Understand
Sets
Plainest
Write
Newspapers
Editorial
Seems
Sentences
Editorials
Anything
Whenever
Distorted
Writing
Writers
Instantly

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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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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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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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