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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

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
Upon
Genuine
Religion
Basic
Shows
Capitalism
Certain
Institutions
Government
Marriage
Boils
Many
Health
Undoubtedly
Men
Modern
Vigor
Doubt
Institution

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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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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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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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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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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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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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Why do men go to zoos?
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