Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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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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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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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 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 ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
H. L. MENCKEN