The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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.
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 -
Change is not progress.
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 -
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
H. L. MENCKEN -
When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
H. L. MENCKEN -
After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. MENCKEN -
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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 ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
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 -
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 -
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. MENCKEN