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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?

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Lying
Resist
Government
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Find
Stealing
Operandi
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Honesty
Whorehouse
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Expect
Murdering
Whose
Chastity
Humanity
Cheating

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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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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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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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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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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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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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