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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
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Historian
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Getting
Holding
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Taking
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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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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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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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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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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