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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.

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
Justice
Running
Money

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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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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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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
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Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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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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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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