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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

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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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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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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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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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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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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