There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
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.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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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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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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Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
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You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
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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.
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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
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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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Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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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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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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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.
H. L. MENCKEN