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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.

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
Powers
Organism
Refuse
Refuses
Effort
Extinction
Courses
Refusal
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Diminish
Government
Organisms
Prerogatives
Like
Involves
Acquiesce
Resistance
Prerogative

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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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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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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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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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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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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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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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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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