Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
H. L. MENCKENAn idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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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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A 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.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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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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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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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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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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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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Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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.
H. L. MENCKEN