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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

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
Worse
Pedants
Always
Diligent
Priest
Expert
Priests
Experts
Nonsense
Logicians
Logic
Pedant

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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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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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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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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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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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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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