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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

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
Political
Beginning
Scoundrels
Firsts
Democracy
Oppressive
Human
Trouble
Aimed
Humans
Liberty
Spends
First
Politics
Defending
Must
Law
Oppression
Time
Fighting
Stopped
Freedom
Laws

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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 cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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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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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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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.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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Why do men go to zoos?
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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