What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. MENCKENA professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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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.
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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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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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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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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.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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.
H. L. MENCKEN