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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

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
Honest
Least
Politics
Nations
Political
Produces
Great
Produce
Men
Nation
People
Century

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What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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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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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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