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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.

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
Reporter
Reporters
Politician
Look
Looks
Way

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
H. L. Mencken
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
H. L. Mencken
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
H. L. Mencken
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
H. L. Mencken
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
H. L. Mencken
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
H. L. Mencken
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
H. L. Mencken
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
H. L. Mencken
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
H. L. Mencken
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H. L. Mencken
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
H. L. Mencken
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
H. L. Mencken
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
H. L. Mencken
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
H. L. Mencken
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken