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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

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
Fear
Complexes
Else
Complex
Everything
Permanent
Men
Safety
Courage
Inexplicable
Emotion
Inferior
Wants
Inferiors
Worry
Unknown

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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
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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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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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