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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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
Speech
Laughing
Common
Free
United
Makes
Prevails
States
Notion
Always
Laugh
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
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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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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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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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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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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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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Every man is his own hell.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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