No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
H. L. MENCKENUnder 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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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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 final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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Change is not progress.
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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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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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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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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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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.
H. L. MENCKEN