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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

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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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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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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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