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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

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
Toothache
Philosophical
Lived
Humor
Never
Men

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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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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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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