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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

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
Word
Sudden
Happiness
Puts
Happy
Accidents
Delicacies
Perfect
Discovery
Searches
Writing
Ears
Painfully
Thing
Constant
Delicacy
Way
Joy
Verbal
Men
Saying
Accident

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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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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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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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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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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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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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