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

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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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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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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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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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