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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

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
Humor
Looking
Freedom
Funny
Voice
Someone
Warns
Might
Inner
Life
Conscience

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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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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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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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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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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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