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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Nature abhors a moron.
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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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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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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 final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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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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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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