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

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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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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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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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