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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

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
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Music
Lascivious
Comforting
Piece
Poetry
Pieces
Fiction

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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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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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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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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?
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Why do men go to zoos?
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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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