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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.

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
Live
Necessary
Arrayed
Unless
Turtles
Liberty
Mud
Law
Frequently
Peace
Voting
Lives
Instrument
Government
Instruments
Find
Safety

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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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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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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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