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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

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
Trying
Virtues
Make
Rage
Always
Weakness
Men
Atheism
Life
Virtue
Fear
Death
Piety
Become
Weaknesses

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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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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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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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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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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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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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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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