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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
Small
Roller
Really
Smartest
Men
Tennessee
Dog
Atheism
Difference
Holy
Differences
Stupidest

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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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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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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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