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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

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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Unintelligent
Responsive
Propaganda
Intelligent

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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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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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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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