After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Tags: H.L. Mencken

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth–that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Tags: H.L. Mencken

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

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Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

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Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. It can’t be done except by liars.

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To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true

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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

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Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

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Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

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The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

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Platitude an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Tags: H.L. Mencken