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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Upon
Genuine
Religion
Basic
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Capitalism
Institutions
Certain
Marriage
Boils
Government
Health
Undoubtedly
Many
Modern
Vigor
Men
Doubt
Institution

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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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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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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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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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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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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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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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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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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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