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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.

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
Prove
Crime
Hold
Democracy
Sound
Better
Heinous
Men
Offense
Argument

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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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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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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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