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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.

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
Believe
Gall
Men
Conditioned
Oil
Stones
Constitution
Law
Free
May

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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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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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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
H. L. Mencken
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
H. L. Mencken
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
H. L. Mencken
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
H. L. Mencken
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
H. L. Mencken