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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind

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
Powerful
Remains
Heaven
Civilization
Common
Mankind
Fear
Inspiration
Makes
Hell
Years
Courses
Denominator
Course
Priests
Called
Thousands

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Nature abhors a moron.
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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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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
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