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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.

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
Notoriously
Endeavor
Atheism
Female
Christian
Hard

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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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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.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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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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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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