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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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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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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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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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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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