The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
H. L. MENCKENThe urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
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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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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
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The 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 common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.
H. L. MENCKEN