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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.

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
Believe
Deals
Professional
Sort
Suffer
Prosper
Teach
Effect
Criminal
Class
Increase
Virtuous
Suffering
Neither
Teaches
Government
Necessary
Wit
Without
Effects
Precisely
Every
Deal
Criminals

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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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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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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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