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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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
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Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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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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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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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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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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