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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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
Hygiene
Corruption
Medicine
Morality
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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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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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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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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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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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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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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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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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.
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