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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.
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
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Genesis
Hell
Wholly
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Threatened
Even
Sunday
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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