Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
H. L. MENCKENEvery decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
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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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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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The 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.
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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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The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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The 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.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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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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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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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.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. MENCKEN