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(This is a test effort. The text is copyrighted, I took it from Biography.com. This
will not be the final version of the text I use.)
Editor, writer; born in Baltimore, Md. He left school after his
father's death (1899) to become a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, later
serving as drama critic, city editor, and then managing editor of the Baltimore Evening
Herald. Soon after the Herald folded in 1906, he joined the Baltimore Sun; he remained
associated with the Sun as editor, columnist, or contributor for most of his career,
but he also wrote for many other publications. Early on, Mencken published studies of
George Bernard Shaw (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), both of whom he admired.
From 1914 to 1923, with George Jean Nathan he coedited a satirical magazine, The Smart
Set; in 1924 he and Nathan cofounded the American Mercury, a cultural magazine for "a
civilized minority," which he coedited for nine years. Social rebels admired Mencken's
clever, iconoclastic attacks on the middle-class "booboisie," prudery, and organized
religion and politics. As a reviewer and critic he lambasted second-rate authors and
championed such writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Joseph Conrad. Many
of his essays and reviews were collected in six volumes of Prejudices (1919--27). In
a different vein, his detailed study, The American Language (1919), traced the
developments of a distinctive American idiom. During the 1930s, Mencken's cynicism
and his antipathy to the New Deal appeared less in tune with the times, and he turned
more toward the past, writing three volumes of memoirs, beginning with Happy Days
(1940). He also added two supplements to his American Language (1945, 1946). A stroke
in 1948 left him incapacitated during his last years.
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The time must come inevitably when mankind
shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the
imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this
world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In its
even highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common
sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of
logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
Minority Report
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What I got in Sunday-School. . .was simply a
firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities,
and the Christian God preposterous. . .The act of worship, as carried on by
Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves
groveling before a Being who, if He really exists, deserves to be renounced
instead of respected.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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Christian theology is not only opposed to the
scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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The most common of all falsities is to believe
passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of
mankind.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us
that someone may be looking.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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Nature abhors a moron.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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If the average man is made in God's image,
then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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No matter how happily a woman may be married,
it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she
were not.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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The notion that a radical is one who hates
his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes
his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the
rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to
crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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Philosophy consists very largely of one
philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually
proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one
himself.
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-Henry Louis Mencken
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