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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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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.
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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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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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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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[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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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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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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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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