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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'.
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
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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The worst government is the most moral.
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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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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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