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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

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
Pressure
Counter
Lawmaker
Principles
Applied
Lawmakers
Game
Wholly
Cannibalism
Games
Typical
Cheerfully
Today
Favor
Polygamy
Right
Favors
Devoid
Would
Principle
Grotesque
Men
Mere
Astrology

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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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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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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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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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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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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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