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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
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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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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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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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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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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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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