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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.

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
Passion
Withers
Sense
Patriotic
Delusion
Truth
Presence
Always
Fronts
Like
Front
Humor
Justice
Messianic

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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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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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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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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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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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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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