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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Government
Bottom
Inferiors
Nothing
General
Laziness
Matter
Intellectual
Superior
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Wisdom
Generally
Inferior
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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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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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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