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The worst government is the most moral.

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
Worst
Moral
Government

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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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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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Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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