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War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.

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
Sport
Sports
Peace
Use
War
Intelligible
Amusing
Genuinely

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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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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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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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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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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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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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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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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 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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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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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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