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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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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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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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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 most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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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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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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