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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

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
Smart
Reader
Worth
Thousand

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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
H. L. Mencken
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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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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
H. L. Mencken
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
H. L. Mencken
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
H. L. Mencken
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
H. L. Mencken