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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
Agreeably
Save
Sham
Possible
Common
Editors
Sense
Civilized
Keep
Commit

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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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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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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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