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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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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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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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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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