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?
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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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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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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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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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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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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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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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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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 State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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