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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
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Government
Talent
Men
Liberty
Auctions
Like
Special
Gang
Politics
Consists
Getting
Holding
Business
Exactly
Political
Office
Another
Taking

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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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