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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Resistance
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Prerogatives

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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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