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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.

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
Stands
Lays
Underprivileged
Writers
Hens
Asks
Patiently
Write
Farmer
Wells
Cows
Well
Farmers
Writing
Eggs

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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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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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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.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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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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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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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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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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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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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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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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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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