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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.

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
Annoy
Mainly
Annoying
Precisely
Equality
Imagine
Freedom
Betters
Kind
Oppress

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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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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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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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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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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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