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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

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
Book
Men
Whisky
Whiskey
Drunk
Constantly
Books

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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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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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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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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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