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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.

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
Atheism
Sects
Development
Rivals
Divine
Theological
Learned
Pastor
Divines
Free
Lowest
Denounce
Show
Professional
Quacks
Shows
Ethics
Rival
Men
Customers
Clergy

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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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