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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

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
Enough
Speech
Ridicule
Feel
Effort
Opposed
Feels
Face
Efforts
Think
Whatever
Reasonable
Thinking
Faces
Racism
People
Free
Secure
Political
Terror
Unalterably
Without
Excuse
Negro

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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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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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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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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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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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