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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.

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
Give
Entertainment
Nothing
Fast
Giving
Committed
Save
Agreeably
Possible
Sham
Common
Editors
Sense
Civilized
Keep
Commit

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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 chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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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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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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