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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Henry Louis Mencken
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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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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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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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 human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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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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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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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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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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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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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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