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.
H. L. MENCKENThe most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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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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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from 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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In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
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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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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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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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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.
H. L. MENCKEN