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

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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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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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