Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. MENCKEN -
You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Change is not progress.
H. L. MENCKEN -
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. MENCKEN