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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.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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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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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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