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

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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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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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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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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.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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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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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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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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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.
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A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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