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

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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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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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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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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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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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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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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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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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