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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

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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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Inglorious

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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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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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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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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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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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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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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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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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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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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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