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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

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
Understand
Appetite
Made
Speak
Runs
Way
Write
Heads
Always
Running
Assumption
People
Able
Folly
Ideas
Cases
Many
Mistake
Assumed
Writing
Read
Plain

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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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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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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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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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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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