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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
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Democratic
Despotic
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Goose
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Democracy
Folk
Common
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Gait
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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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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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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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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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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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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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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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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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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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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