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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
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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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.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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