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.
H. L. MENCKENEvangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
H. L. MENCKEN -
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. MENCKEN -
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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.
H. L. MENCKEN -
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN -
Change is not progress.
H. L. MENCKEN -
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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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
H. L. MENCKEN -
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. MENCKEN