Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. MENCKENPuritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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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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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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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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Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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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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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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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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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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