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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.

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
Cigars
Smokers
Cigar
Ugly

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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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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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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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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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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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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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