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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

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
Liberty
Politics
Freedom
Plausible
Nationalism
Lives
Libertarian
Government
Ashamed
Every
Decent
Men
Integrity

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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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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 detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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