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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.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Historian
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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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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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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