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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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
Thrive
Democracy
Politics
Monkey
Science
Cage
Running
Cages
Art
Circus
Political
Monkeys
Insanity
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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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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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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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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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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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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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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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken