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.
H. L. MENCKENSometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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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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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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.
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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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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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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.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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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.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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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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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
H. L. MENCKEN