It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
H. L. MENCKENIt doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
H. L. MENCKENImagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. MENCKENNo 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.
H. L. MENCKENIt 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.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKENThere’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
H. L. MENCKENNo 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.
H. L. MENCKENAn idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. MENCKENFreedom of press is limited to those who own one.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
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. MENCKENChange is not progress.
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. MENCKENAlways remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
H. L. MENCKENA sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
H. L. MENCKEN