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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Moral
Composed
Often
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Government
Humane
Limit
Oppression
Cynics
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Worst
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Literature
Fanatics
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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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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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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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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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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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
