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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.

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
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Men
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Cage
Time
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Tail
Watching
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Combated
Spend
Vegetarian
Flies
Gnaw
Sort
Precisely
Lion
Lizard
Public
Catch
Tails
Fostered

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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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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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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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