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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

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
Poetry
Pieces
Fiction
Less
Music
Lascivious
Comforting
Piece

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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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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 cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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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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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.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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