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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

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
Enemy
Given
Sober
Ever
Enemies
Matter
Reflection
Every
Eternal
Democracy
Liberty

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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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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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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
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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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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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