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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

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
Men
Liberty
Unintelligent
Worst
Tolerable
Actually
Grasping
Government
Arbitrary
Even
Cruel
Really
Civilized
Good
Libertarian
Never
Failure

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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Nature abhors a moron.
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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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The worst government is the most moral.
H. L. Mencken
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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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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
H. L. Mencken
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
H. L. Mencken
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
H. L. Mencken
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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
H. L. Mencken