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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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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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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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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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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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