Quote

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

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
Eager
Convinced
Speech
Ready
American
Alarm
Free
Detest
Really
Alarms
People
Slightest

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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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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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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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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.
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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
H. L. Mencken
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
H. L. Mencken
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
H. L. Mencken