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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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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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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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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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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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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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Every man is his own hell.
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
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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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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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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 have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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