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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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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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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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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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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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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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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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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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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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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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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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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
H. L. Mencken