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

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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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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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