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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

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
Preaching
Cynical
Idiot
Demagogue
Doctrine
Demagoguery
Spirituality
Preaches
Men
Doctrines
Idiots
Untrue

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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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Every man is his own hell.
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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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Why do men go to zoos?
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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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.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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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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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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