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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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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
Trying
Survive
Fanatics
Really
Special
Tries
Always
Called
Classes
Class
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Rights
Governments
Whittle
Often
Highly
Insofar
Government
Favors
Dubious
Ever
Civil
Preserved
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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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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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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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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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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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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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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