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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
Evils
Cure
Cures
Democracy
Freedom
Evil

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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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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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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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