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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.

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
Writers
Hens
Asks
Patiently
Write
Farmer
Wells
Cows
Well
Farmers
Writing
Eggs
Stands
Lays
Underprivileged

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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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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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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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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For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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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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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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