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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Necessary
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human 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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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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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 living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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