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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.

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
Ill
Politics
House
Would
Like
Repute
Virgin
Virgins
Sending

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It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
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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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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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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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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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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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Why do men go to zoos?
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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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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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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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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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