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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

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
Time
Turns
Election
Faith
Save
Rascals
Making
Speech
Steals
Political
Sitting
Speeches
Past
Spend
Gang
Nothing
Turn
Articles
Many
Politics
Candidates
Much
Party
Stealing

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.
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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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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
H. L. Mencken
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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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.
H. L. Mencken