The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
H. L. MENCKENThe only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
H. L. MENCKENMorality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
H. L. MENCKENWhen somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
H. L. MENCKENEvery election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. MENCKENThe aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
H. L. MENCKENA professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
H. L. MENCKENGovernment’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
H. L. MENCKENFreedom of press is limited to those who own one.
H. L. MENCKENNo 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. MENCKENSocialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
H. L. MENCKENImagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKENThere’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
H. L. MENCKENAlways remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
H. L. MENCKENThe 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.
H. L. MENCKEN