Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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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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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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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.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
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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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The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
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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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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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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.
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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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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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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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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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