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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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
Dog
Atheism
Difference
Holy
Differences
Stupidest
Small
Roller
Really
Smartest
Men
Tennessee
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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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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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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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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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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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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