Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. MENCKENSometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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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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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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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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 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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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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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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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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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.
H. L. MENCKEN






