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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.

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
Cost
Peters
Close
Embracing
Hold
Costs
Lying
Peter
Jobs
Truths
Business
Ground
Ever
Ears
Trying
Politician

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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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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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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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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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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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