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

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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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