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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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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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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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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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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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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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