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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
People
Deserve
Theory
Democracy
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Common
Freedom
Hard
Good
Politician
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
H. L. Mencken
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
H. L. Mencken
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve 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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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
H. L. Mencken
