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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.

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
Men
Mental
Expense
Cage
Time
Weakness
Vegan
Tail
Watching
Lions
Cages
Whose
Expenses
Chase
Combated
Spend
Vegetarian
Flies
Gnaw
Sort
Precisely
Lion
Lizard
Public
Catch
Tails
Fostered
Another
Likes
Monkeys
Lizards

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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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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.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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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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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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