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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness

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
Sediment
Heartedness
Ancestral
Accumulated
Faint
Conscience

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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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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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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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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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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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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 judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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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 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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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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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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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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