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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.

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
Rights
Troops
Whittling
Peace
Interpretation
Prohibiting
Force
Bill
Disposed
Time
Bills
Legislative
Effect
Judicial
Citizens
Guarantee
Effects
Continues
Rest
Guarantees

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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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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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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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