An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. MENCKENEvery decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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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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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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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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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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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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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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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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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Change is not progress.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
H. L. MENCKEN