You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H. L. MENCKENThe State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
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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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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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 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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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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The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
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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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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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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 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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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.
H. L. MENCKEN