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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Historian
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
World
Twenties
Chimpanzees
Paces
Prove
Theologian
Chimpanzee
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Autopsy
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Gorilla
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Heavyweight
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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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 know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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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 cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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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 truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
H. L. Mencken