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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.

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
Pass
Function
Called
Fragmentary
Knowledge
Untrue
Body
Unimportant
Professor
Largely
Professors

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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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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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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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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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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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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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