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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

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
Freedom
Evil
Evils
Cure
Cures
Democracy

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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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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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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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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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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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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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