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

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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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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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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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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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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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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 trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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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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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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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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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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