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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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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 difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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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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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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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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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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