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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.

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
Influence
Winning
Syllogism
Talk
Moonshine
Much
Conquering
People
Impeccable
Appealing
Conquer
Intelligence

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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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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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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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