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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.

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
Sound
Better
Heinous
Men
Offense
Argument
Prove
Crime
Hold
Democracy

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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
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I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
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