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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.

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
Funerals
Attend
Funeral
Certainly
Age
Friends
Remember
Always

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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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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 notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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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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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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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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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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