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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
Pretense
Improving
Annoying
Saving
Whenever
Injures
Scoundrel
Annoys
Scoundrels

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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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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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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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