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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Murder
Heroines
Occultism
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Lincoln
Thirdly
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Firsts
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Secondly
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Books
Overcoming
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Claptrap

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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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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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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
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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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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
H. L. Mencken
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A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.
H. L. Mencken
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
H. L. Mencken