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Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Lieutenants
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Vessels
Book
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Lieutenant

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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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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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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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