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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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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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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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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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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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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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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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