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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

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
Activity
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Really
Never
Mouthing
Men
Clich
Thinking
Mental
Life
Thinks
People
Average

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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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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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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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Every man is his own hell.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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