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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.

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
White
House
Busts
Ideas
Libertarianism
Libertarian
Suffer
Liberty
Economic
Suffering

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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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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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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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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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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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