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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.

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
Metropolis
Nineteen
Suburbs
Angeles
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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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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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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