Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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It 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.
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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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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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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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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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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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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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People 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?
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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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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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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The 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.
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The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. MENCKEN