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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

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
Literature
Fanatics
Moral
Composed
Often
Usa
Government
Humane
Limit
Oppression
Cynics
Limits
Cynic
Worst
Tolerant

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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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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 instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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