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. MENCKENOn some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
-
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Under 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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. MENCKEN -
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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 -
On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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 -
Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. MENCKEN






