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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.

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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Historian
Journalist
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Allan
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Edgar

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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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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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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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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
H. L. Mencken
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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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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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
H. L. Mencken
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
H. L. Mencken
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
H. L. Mencken
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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Why do men go to zoos?
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
H. L. Mencken