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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.

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
Protect
Foster
Theory
Citizen
Liberty
Governments
Modern
Limit
Practice
Civilized
Government
Limits
Sometimes
Exercise
Citizens
Narrowly

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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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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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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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Why do men go to zoos?
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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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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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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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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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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