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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

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
Process
Human
Humans
Appendix
Whiskers
Whereby
Progress
Race

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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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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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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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