Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
H. L. MENCKENJournalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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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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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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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.
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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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The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
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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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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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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Change is not progress.
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There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
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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