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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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
Really
Would
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Illegal
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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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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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.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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