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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
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Liberty
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Tyrant
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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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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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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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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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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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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Why do men go to zoos?
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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