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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.

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
Capacity
Utility
Unmitigated
Politics
Apparent
Tickle
High
Gang
Soothe
Forget
Services
Sordid
Art
Makers
Incomparable
Doe
Appear
Scoundrels
Lows
Obscene
Midriff
Entertainment
Maker
Salient

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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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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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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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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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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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