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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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
Doesn
States
Make
Obey
Wants
State
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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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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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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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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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
H. L. Mencken
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H. L. Mencken
It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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