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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
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Prison
Dubious
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Prevented
Crime
Grounded
Poverty
Sole
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Prevent
Almost
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Upon
Punishment
Idea
Obviously
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to ruleāand both commonly succeed, and are right.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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