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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.

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
Worth
Stand
Knowing
Free
Seems
Shameful
Really
Association
Way
Prejudice
Men
Waste

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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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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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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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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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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
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
H. L. Mencken