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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

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
Writing
Read
Plain
Even
Understand
Appetite
Made
Speak
Runs
Way
Write
Heads
Always
Running
Assumption
People
Able
Folly
Ideas
Cases
Many
Mistake
Assumed

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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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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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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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