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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.

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
Nothing
Speech
Tempted
Right
Unless
Seldom
Even
Worth
Fellow
Make
Full
Foolish
Effort
Fellows
Franchise
Belief
Deny
Malicious
Wrong
Convinced
Differentiate
Free
Profound
Includes

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Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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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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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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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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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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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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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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