Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. MENCKENWhat men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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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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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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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?
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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.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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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.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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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.
H. L. MENCKEN






