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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.

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
Teach
Burglar
Politics
Burglars
Experience
Unthinkable
Anything
Teaches
Good
Politician
Honest
Democracy
Quite

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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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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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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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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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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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