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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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
Ransom
Devil
Pay
Marriage
Happy
Alimony
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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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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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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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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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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It is only doubt that creates.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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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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