The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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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.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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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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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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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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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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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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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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There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
H. L. MENCKEN