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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

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
Enjoy
Incomparably
Immensely
Idiotic
Amusing
Confess
Hence

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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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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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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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