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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Political
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Liberty
Auctions
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Holding
Business
Exactly
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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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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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 effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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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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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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