Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
H. L. MENCKENUnder democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
-
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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 -
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
H. L. MENCKEN -
There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
H. L. MENCKEN -
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. MENCKEN -
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Change is not progress.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H. L. MENCKEN