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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories

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
Many
Gay
Preposterous
Much
Nine
Moreover
Made
Golf
Eternally
Drama
Lively
Concern
Taxation
Mellowed
Theory
Theories
Tenths
Example
Concerns
Gaudy
Either
Directly
Smallpox

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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.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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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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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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