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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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
Trying
Debtors
Men
Creditors
Like
Bulls
Thrust
Cows
Aim
Deals
Class
Exterminate
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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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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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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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.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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