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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.

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
Make
Superstitions
Polite
Rout
Ridiculous
Cripple
Arms
Cripples
Deal
Infamous
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Tackle
Forever
Superstitious
Way
Superstition

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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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