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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.

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
North
South
Fighting
Wrong
Gettysburg
Government
Abraham
Thing
Lincoln
People
Address
Addresses

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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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