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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

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
Begin
Baby
Peace
War
Glands
Political
Babies
Come
Smaller
Never
Larger
World
Cease

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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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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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