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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.

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
Crime
Trials
Land
Acts
Wonder
Sufficient
Fact
Proof
Facts
Committed
Atrocious
Men
Judging
Deciding
Responsible
Judges
Begin
Trial

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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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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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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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