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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.

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
Going
Drinker
Men
Drinkers
Thinking
Dogs
World
Stopped
Beer
Drinking
Thinks
Dog

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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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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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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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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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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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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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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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