A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
H. L. MENCKENOnce a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
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The 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.
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The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
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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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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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 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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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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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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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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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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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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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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.
H. L. MENCKEN