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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

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
Foundation
Worth
Sort
Economic
Freedom
Damn
Independence

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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
H. L. Mencken
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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