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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.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Historian
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Good
Sell
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United
States
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Cynical
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Patriotism
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Devices
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
H. L. Mencken
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
H. L. Mencken
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
H. L. Mencken
A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
H. L. Mencken
No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
H. L. Mencken
I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
H. L. Mencken
To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
H. L. Mencken
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. Mencken
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
H. L. Mencken
It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
H. L. Mencken
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
H. L. Mencken
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken
