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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

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
Atheist
Methodist
Whenever
Methodists
Atheism
Assigned
Comes
Conference
Home
Reporter
Conferences
Reporters
Cover

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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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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 clichés.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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