On 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.
H. L. MENCKENIt 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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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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.
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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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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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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.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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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.
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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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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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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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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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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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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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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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Change is not progress.
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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