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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
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Historian
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Century
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Thirteenth

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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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