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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
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Thinking
Artists
Band
Fun
Hear
Regiment
Making
Businessmen
Artist
Businessman
Makes
Authors
Think
Cooks

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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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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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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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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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