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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.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Historian
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Lets
Libertarian
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Escapes
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Onward
Liberty
Aristotle
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Barely
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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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 best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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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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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 war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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