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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

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
Think
Whatever
Reasonable
Thinking
Faces
Racism
People
Free
Secure
Political
Terror
Unalterably
Without
Excuse
Negro
Enough
Speech
Ridicule
Feel
Effort
Opposed
Feels
Face
Efforts

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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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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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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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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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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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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 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.
H. L. Mencken
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I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.
H. L. Mencken
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
H. L. Mencken