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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.

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
Something
Delight
Laying
Men
Pleasure
Enjoys
Getting
Fundamentally
Enjoy
Unlike
Sense
Eggs
Done
Relief
Work
Suppose
Kind
Satisfaction
Hens

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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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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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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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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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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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