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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

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
Unintelligent
Responsive
Propaganda
Intelligent
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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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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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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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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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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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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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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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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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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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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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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