All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
H. L. MENCKENAll government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
H. L. MENCKENSocialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
H. L. MENCKENWhen somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
H. L. MENCKENMorality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
H. L. MENCKENThe demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. MENCKENPeople do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
H. L. MENCKENA 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.
H. L. MENCKENAfter all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKENThe ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
H. L. MENCKENIt is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. MENCKENThe theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKENWhat men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKENThe kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
H. L. MENCKEN