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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

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
Small
Spots
Light
Suppose
Nine
Eight
Intelligence
Large
Murky
Room
Spot
Rooms
Floor

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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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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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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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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.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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