Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. MENCKENMost people want security in this world, not liberty.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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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There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
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It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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