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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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
Enables
Torture
Duty
Achieve
Sense
Also
Men
Tortures
Prodigies
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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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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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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