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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

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
Enjoy
Attain
Write
Cows
Feelings
Milk
Order
Achieved
Giving
Tension
Writing
Function
Feeling
Enjoys
Literature
Relieved

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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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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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Why do men go to zoos?
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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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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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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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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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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