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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

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
Boys
Imagine
Getting
Genuinely
Even
Cynical
Much
Save
Mind
Intelligent
Good
Habit
College

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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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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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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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