The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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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 art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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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.
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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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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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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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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
H. L. MENCKEN






