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. MENCKENSometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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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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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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A 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.
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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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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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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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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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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 trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. MENCKEN