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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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
Least
Deter
Freedom
Scoundrel
Next
Scoundrels
Doe
Disposed
Wells
Hanging
Firsts
Appears
Well
First
Democracy
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
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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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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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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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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