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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.

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
Annoying
Saving
Whenever
Injures
Scoundrel
Annoys
Scoundrels
Pretense
Improving

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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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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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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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