There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
H. L. MENCKENThere is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
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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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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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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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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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.
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It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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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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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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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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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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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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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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.
H. L. MENCKEN