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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.

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
Comes
Throat
Every
Rage
Hoist
Men
Atheism
Throats
Time
Cutting
Palms
Life
Start
Spit
Desire
Flag
Fear
Consumed
Black
Flags

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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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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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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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