Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. MENCKENImagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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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?
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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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 kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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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 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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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. MENCKEN