The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
H. L. MENCKENThe most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
-
Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
H. L. MENCKEN -
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. MENCKEN -
After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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 -
You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H. L. MENCKEN -
There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
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 men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
H. L. MENCKEN -
A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. MENCKEN -
No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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 -
When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
H. L. MENCKEN