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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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
Stolen
Advance
Goods
Election
Liberty
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Auction
Politics
Auctions
Every
Sale
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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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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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
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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 federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
H. L. Mencken
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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