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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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
Ignorant
Ignorance
Crazy
Democracy
Crazier
Literature
Device
Freedom
Newspaper
Making
Devices
Newspapers
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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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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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
H. L. Mencken
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
H. L. Mencken
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
H. L. Mencken
The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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