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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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
Enormously
Exaggerated
Theatre
Done
Life
Hideously
Magnified
Miniature
Miniatures
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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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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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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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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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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