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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.

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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Historian
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Literary Critic
Satirist
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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