If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
H. L. MENCKENDemocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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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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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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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
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It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. MENCKEN