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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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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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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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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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