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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
Heritage
Atmosphere
Neither
Education
Law
Making
Culture

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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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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.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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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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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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