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During a career that encompassed several roles and lasted for nearly fifty years, Henry Louis Mencken was above all else a libertarian. He saw freedom of speech as the most valuable attribute of any society, and he insisted, throughout some long and bloody battles, upon the need for civil liberty for all people regardless of color, gender, origin, or social class. One of the most articulate members of America's adversary culture, he reveled in his iconoclasm. "The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by ... learned dunderheads," he thundered in Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924), "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 his sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud." As both writer and editor, he heaved many a dead cat and knocked many a false icon from its shaky pedestal.
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