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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.

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
Every
Chicago
Paris
London
Cities
Buttermilk
Alive
Snout
American
Tail
Give
Tails
Giving
Harvard

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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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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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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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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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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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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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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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