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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.

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
Education
Law
Making
Culture
Heritage
Atmosphere
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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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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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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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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