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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
Need
Honesty
Whorehouse
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People
Expect
Murdering
Whose
Chastity
Humanity
Cheating

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
H. L. Mencken
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
H. L. Mencken
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
H. L. Mencken
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H. L. Mencken
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
H. L. Mencken
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
H. L. Mencken
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
H. L. Mencken
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
H. L. Mencken
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
H. L. Mencken
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H. L. Mencken
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
H. L. Mencken
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
H. L. Mencken
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
H. L. Mencken
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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.
H. L. Mencken
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
H. L. Mencken
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
H. L. Mencken
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken