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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
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Democracy
Politics
Common
Freedom
Hard
Good
Politician
People
Deserve
Theory

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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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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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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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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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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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