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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

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
Permitted
Speech
Dangerous
Democracy
Free

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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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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.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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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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