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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

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
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Would
State
Images
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Two
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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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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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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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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The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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Every man is his own hell.
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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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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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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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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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