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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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
Democracy
Love
Infidelity
Adultery
Application
Marriage
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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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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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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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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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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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 trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
H. L. Mencken
The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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