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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

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
Stupidity
Complete
Often
Indistinguishable
Masculinity

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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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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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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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