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

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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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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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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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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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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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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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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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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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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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