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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.

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
Without
Answering
Right
Controversial
Even
Formula
Formulas
Letters
Dear
Reading
May
Madame

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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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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 clichés.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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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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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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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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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
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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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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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