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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

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
Race
Minority
Heritage
Minorities
Belongs
Intellectual

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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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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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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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 world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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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 true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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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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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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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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