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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

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
Actually
Government
Grasping
Men
Arbitrary
Civilized
Libertarian
Failure
Liberty
Worst

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What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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