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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.

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
Odds
Modern
Jesus
Christ
Favoring
Place
Judas
America
Courtroom
Would
Betting
World
Equals

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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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