There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
H. L. MENCKENThe State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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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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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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 cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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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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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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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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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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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 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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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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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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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
H. L. MENCKEN