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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
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Whorehouse

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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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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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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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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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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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