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

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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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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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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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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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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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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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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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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 almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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