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

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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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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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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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