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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
Always
Laugh
Speech
Laughing
Common
Free
United
Makes
Prevails
States
Notion
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
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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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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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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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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