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

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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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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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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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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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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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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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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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