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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.

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
Despite
Chiefly
Literature
Respectable
Much
Promised
Always
Mediocrity
Remarkable
Starts
Several
False

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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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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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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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