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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.

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
Granite
Like
Loaded
Ship
Steel
Ships
Politics
American
History
Sailed

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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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