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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

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
Wife
Laughed
Woman
Standard
Away
Survive
Women
Morality
Made
Standards
Lured
Long
Husband
Favoured
Men
Tears
Sympathetic
World
Whose
Double

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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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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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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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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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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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