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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

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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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Talent
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Bureaucrat
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Forming

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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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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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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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