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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.

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
Two
Life
Impossibilities
Impossibility
Drinking
Politician
Drink
Honest

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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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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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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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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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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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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Every man is his own hell.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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