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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.

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
Artist
Hath
Art
Assume
Country
Assuming
Dignity
Safe
Environment
Almost
Society
Placed

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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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