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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.
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
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Mind
Symphony
Make
Mistress
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Composer
Critics
Quite
Seen
Music
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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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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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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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 chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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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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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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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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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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