For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. MENCKENChange is not progress.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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 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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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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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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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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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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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
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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.
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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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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 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