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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public

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
Underestimate
Taste
Public
American
Never

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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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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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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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