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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
Freedom
Deter
Next
Scoundrel
Doe
Scoundrels
Wells
Disposed
Firsts
Hanging
Well
Appears
First
Democracy
Least

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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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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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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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