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HL Mencken is seriously the most 180 writer & wit in US history
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Date: April 12th, 2013 4:59 PM Author: Deep ticket booth and yes I have heard of Mark Twain.
Here are a few examples:
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
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he has thousands of lines like this |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:16 PM Author: mischievous incel Ah, I was all about to be like "(Guy who never read Mark Twain)" (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985478) |
Date: April 12th, 2013 5:00 PM Author: Deep ticket booth Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985396) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:06 PM Author: adulterous spectacular resort selfie Convince me Mencken isn't a Nietzschean epigone (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985424) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:09 PM Author: Deep ticket booth Mencken is funnier, but clearly he read a lot of Nietzsche. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985435) |
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Date: March 29th, 2014 10:29 PM Author: buck-toothed bistre toaster great (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25287206) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 4:05 PM Author: Indigo Gunner Pervert Sounds like a shitlib. There is no progress in morals. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661306) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 8:37 PM Author: Razzle hairless plaza ratface (2014 xo v 2024 xo) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47662053) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:00 PM Author: beady-eyed water buffalo (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985398) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:01 PM Author: beady-eyed water buffalo These are far from his best lines breh (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985402) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:02 PM Author: Deep ticket booth these are lines I encountered in 4 hours of reading Mencken. His best quotes are everywhere. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985409) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:01 PM Author: Contagious cyan immigrant stage Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985405) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:03 PM Author: Deep ticket booth The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians — and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe — that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985414) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:04 PM Author: greedy bawdyhouse eh (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985417) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 3:57 PM Author: Umber pocket flask (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661273) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:05 PM Author: Provocative dun locale halford (david simon) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985420) |
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Date: April 12th, 2013 5:07 PM Author: Deep ticket booth [T]he American people, taking one with the other, are the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the Middle Ages. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#22985425) |
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Date: March 29th, 2014 10:19 PM Author: Odious fantasy-prone sanctuary (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25287131) |
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Date: April 15th, 2014 7:17 PM Author: Racy den messiness It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25389120) |
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Date: April 15th, 2014 7:18 PM Author: Racy den messiness The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? . . . They are laughing at Nietzsche yet . . . (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25389126) |
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Date: April 15th, 2014 7:19 PM Author: Racy den messiness If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25389129) |
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Date: April 15th, 2014 7:19 PM Author: Racy den messiness The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25389131) |
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Date: April 15th, 2014 7:20 PM Author: Racy den messiness Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? ... it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. … I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25389137) |
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Date: April 15th, 2014 7:23 PM Author: Racy den messiness Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#25389154) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 9:38 PM Author: Glittery wrinkle (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47662192) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 3:52 PM Author: Boyish mint indirect expression preventive strike (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661258) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 3:58 PM Author: Umber pocket flask idk if pithy zingers make one a great writer. if they did, then ambrose bierce would have to be up there (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661277) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 4:44 PM Author: Frozen Brass Site He could also actually write good fiction. Mencken is a fake Liberal Artist. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661417) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 4:47 PM Author: Umber pocket flask (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661422) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 4:48 PM Author: orange mood I have been to his house in Baltimore. Sadly deep in ghetto territory. The surrounding neighborhood is great for modern day urban archeology. Look! There used to be a decent middle class neighborhood! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661428) |
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Date: May 14th, 2024 4:49 PM Author: sticky mother station I thought he made kitchen knives (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227062&forum_id=2#47661431) |