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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Fact
Jews
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Jew
Matter
Reasonable
Many
Western
Fastened
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Atheism
Poetical
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Less
Vastly
Religion
Religions

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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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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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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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