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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

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
Political
Favors
Two
Main
Ideas
Criticism
Writing
Liberty
Polemic
Whether
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Hate
Fraud
Strong
Literary
Running
Favor

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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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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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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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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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