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

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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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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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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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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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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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It is only doubt that creates.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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