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

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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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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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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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Every man is his own hell.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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