The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
H. L. MENCKENThere is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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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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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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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.
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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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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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The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
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The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
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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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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
H. L. MENCKEN