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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

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
Simply
Argue
Gratuitous
Knowledge
Revelations
Preposterous
Give
Intuition
Seeker
Must
Arguing
Seekers
Giving
Patient
Confront
Dignity
Inquiry
Filled
Revelation
Ignorance
Gaps

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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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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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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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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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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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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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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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