A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. MENCKENSometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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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 chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
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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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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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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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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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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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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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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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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
H. L. MENCKEN